Jonas Danen, MA

Jonas Danen holds a BA in history and an MA in American studies from the University of Amsterdam. His master’s thesis, “A Timeless Naturalist, Artist, and Philosopher: Mark Catesby and the Gardenization of the American Natural Landscape,” was nominated by the faculty for the 2022 Theodore Roosevelt American History Award. Before beginning his PhD at the RCC, Jonas has worked in one of the biggest medieval churches in the Netherlands, conducting, among many other things, socio-cultural research on the bat population inside the building.

Jonas joined the Doctoral Program Environment and Society in October 2023. His dissertation explores why in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the American natural world was perceived by European naturalists and colonial settlers as a metaphorical garden, theirs to shape and manipulate with the extraction and introduction of natural specimens, how this perception was manifested in settlements and various kinds of collections of natural knowledge, and what the consequences of this idea were. His project will shed light on the colonization, cultivation, and commodification of the American natural world, i.e., its “gardenization.”

Selected Publications:

• “The Societal Eggshell: Breeding in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries.” Netherlands American Studies Review (Spring 2021): 10–15. http://www.netherlands-america.nl/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/NASR-Spring-2021.pdf.