Robert Zwijnenberg is professor of art history in relation to the development of science and technology at Universiteit Maastricht and Universiteit Leiden. He has published on Renaissance culture and art theory, philosophy of art, and on the relation between the arts and sciences. He is the author of The Writings and Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci. Order and Chaos in Early Modern Thought (Cambridge University Press 1999), contributing co-editor (with Claire Farago) of Compelling Visuality. Works of art in and out history (University of Minnesota Press 2003), and contributing co-editor (with Florike Egmond) of Bodily Extremities. Preoccupations with the Human Body in Early Modern European Culture (Ashgate Press 2003). He is currently preparing a volume on anachronisms in the Humanities and a volume on the interiority of the human body. Trained in civil engineering and philosophy, he received a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Amsterdam. He was a visiting professor at the University of Stockholm and the University of Colorado at Boulder. At the Universiteit Maastricht, he is project leader of the interdisciplinary research program The Mediated Body (funded by The Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research - NWO), investigating various medical, scientific and artistic ways of visualizing the interior human body and its boundaries. He is also project leader of the interdisciplinary research program New Representational Spaces (funded by NWO); this program aims to describe and analyze the unique role that the visual arts can have in the critical evaluation and dissemination of the results of genomics research. New Representational Spaces is conducted by PhD-students and post-docs at the universities of Leiden, Maastricht en Amsterdam. He is one of the founding directors of The Arts and Genomics Centre (Amsterdam – www.artsgenomics.org).
Robert Zwijnenberg particpated in the debates on October 8th and 15th 2005.
