Plunder, Wonder, and War in Early Modern Sweden was created from a Fall 2025 course at Middlebury College, taught by Professor Robyn Barrow. Twelve students explored Sweden’s history from its emergence as an independent state through the development of its modern aesthetic and cultural identity:
Sofia Malmqvist ’28, Luke Parr ’27, Annabel Pick ’26, Alex Glasscock ’27.5, Julia Breckenridge ’26, Mauricio Ibarra-Munoz ’28, Annalise Johnson ’26, Nate Belman ’26, Owen Johnson ’26, Shepard Karina ’27, Chima Nwaukwa ’29, and Nikolas Homan ’29.

At the center of the course was the Plunder Project, in which each student independently researched a work of art taken by Swedish forces during the Early Modern period. Students traced each painting’s history, conducted visual and historical analysis, and explored how its meaning changed through plunder, displacement, and new contexts of display. The project culminated in visual analyses, research essays, presentations, audio guides, and wall labels.

This exhibition brings these individual histories together to examine the larger story of Swedish cultural plunder. By creating a shared digital resource, we hope to make these works and their complicated histories accessible as an academic tool while highlighting the international and distinctly Swedish dimensions of the collection.

The website was developed and organized by Sofia Malmqvist ’28 in collaboration with Professor Robyn Barrow, who worked together on the exhibition’s research, writing, organization, and translation.