John White

John White is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Art & Archaeology at Princeton University, and for 2025–2026 is a BAEF-Rubenianum fellow in Antwerp and an affiliated researcher with VISU. His research investigates the intersections among art, nature, and science in early modern (northern) Europe, construed in a global context. Specifically, his dissertation examines a corpus of carved ivories, especially from aquatic animals like walruses and narwhals, for their relationships to other artistic mediums, the history of natural history, knowledge of the ocean, and the status of animals in the early modern period. He received a B.A. from Brown University and a master’s degree from the University of Edinburgh, where his research focused on dance made for the camera. In addition to his academic work, he is a dancer and a performer.