Thijs Weststeijn focuses on the Dutch seventeenth century and the global connections that shaped it, as well as objects from beyond Europe that allow different ways of looking back at the Netherlands. He approaches artworks as sites of encounter and confrontation: between cultures; between colonies and the metropolis; between humans and ecology; between predicative knowledge and what might be more fundamental. He chairs the research project ‘Histories of Global Netherlandish Art, 1550-1750'.

Previously, he was Associate Professor of Heritage Studies at the University of Amsterdam (where he worked with the team of The Chinese Impact) and held fellowships from, among others, the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin.

Thijs started his career as an intern with the Rembrandt Research Project and a PhD thesis on art theory in Rembrandt's circle (read it in Open Access: The Visible World: Samuel van Hoogstraten's Art Theory and the Legitimation of Painting in the Dutch Golden Age, AUP 2008). He contributed (as curator, researcher, and author) to various museums and was trained for two years in studio art (at Ruudt Wackers Academy Amsterdam). 

He is a founding editor of the journal History of Humanities and a member of the editorial boards of the Netherlands Yearbook for History of Art and the book series Studies in Early Modernity in the Netherlands.