Travel, Agency, and the Circulation of Knowledge

Mary Baine Campbell is a Professor of English at Brandeis University, where she also teaches in Comparative Literature, Women’s and Gender Studies and the Creative Writing program. She is the author of The Witness and the Other World: European Travel Writing 400–1600 and Wonder and Science: Imagining Worlds in Early Modern Europe (which won the MLA’s James Russell Lowell Prize for Best Book), along with two books of poetry. More recently she has been studying early modern dreams and dream theory in English, French, Huron, Iroquois and Abenaki societies; she is at work on a related book under the Title Dreaming, Motion, Meaning: Oneirics of the Atlantic World, 1550–1750.

Gabriele Dürbeck is professor of literature and culture studies at University of Vechta since 2011. She is author of the book Stereotype Paradiese. Ozeanismus in der deutschsprachigen Südseeliteratur, 1815–1914 (2007) and editor of the special focus on “Writing Catastrophes: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Semantics of Natural and Anthropogenic Disasters,” Ecozona. European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment 3.1 (2012). Her recent books are Postkoloniale Germanistik. Bestandsaufnahme, theoretische Perspektiven, Lektüren (edited with Axel Dunker, Bielefeld 2014) and Ecocriticism. Eine Einführung (edited with Urte Stobbe, Köln 2015). She is currently working on the Metzler handbook Postkolonialismus und Literatur (edited with Dirk Göttsche and Axel Dunker), a volume on Ökologischer Wandel in der deutschsprachigen Literatur des 20. und 21. Jahrhunderts (2017), and a volume on Ecological Thought in German Literature and Culture (2017).

Ottmar Ette has been Chair of Romance and Comparative Literature at the University of Potsdam, Germany since 1995. He has been a visiting professor in various countries of Latin America and in the USA. In 2014, Ette was elected Honorary member of the Modern Language Association. Since 2013, he has been a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities and member of the ‘Leibniz-Sozietät der Wissenschaften zu Berlin’. He also has been a regular member of the Academia Europaea since 2010. His research interests include TransArea Studies and the Global History of Literatures of the World, Alexander von Humboldts “American Travel Diaries” and “Science on the Move” as well as Literary Theory and Philosophy without a fixed about. A compilation of his current book projects is now published in English: Writing-Between Worlds. TransArea Studies and the Literatures-without-a-fixed-Abode (Berlin/New York 2016) and Literature on the Move (New York 2003). Further books were published in German, Spanish and currently in Portuguese.

Rupert Gaderer has a PhD from the University of Vienna, and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Media Studies at the Ruhr University Bochum. His research areas include the relationship between the Natural Sciences and Literature, Law and Media Technology, and Travel Literature about Italy. His recent publications include Poetik der Technik. Elektrizität und Optik bei E.T.A. Hoffmann (Freiburg 2009); Querulanz. Skizze eines exzessiven Rechtsgefühls (Hamburg 2012); and two edited volumes with Fabio Camilletti, Martin Doll and Jan Niklas Howe, Hauntings I: Narrating the Uncanny (Leuven 2010) and Hauntings II: Uncanny Figures and Twilight Zones (Leuven 2012). In his current book project he explores the cultural techniques, the media, and the literature about litigations from the early eighteenth century until today.

Leila Gómez is associate professor of Latin American and Comparative literature at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She specializes in travel narratives about Latin America and their relation to informal empires and knowledge in Europe and North America. She studies the travels of scientists, archaeologists, photographers, and writers. Among her books are Iluminados y tránsfugas. Relatos de viajeros y fi cciones fundaciones en Argentina, Paraguay y Perú (Iberoamericana Vervuert 2009), La piedra del escándalo. Darwin en Argentina (1845–1909) (Simurg 2008, editor), Darwin in Argentina (Major Texts 1845–1909) (Bucknell UP 2011, editor), Entre Borges y Conrad: Estética y territorio en W. H. Hudson (Iberomericana Vervuert 2012, editor with Sara Castro-Klarén), and Teaching Gender through Latin American, Spanish and Latino Literature and Culture (Sense Publishers 2015, editor with Asunción Horno-Delgado, Mary Long and Núria Silleras).

Bruce Greenfield (BA, York; MA, McGill; PhD, Columbia) is Associate Professor of English, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada. His research deals mostly with the literature of travel in the Americas, in English and French, ranging from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. Publications include: Narrating Discovery: The Romantic Explorer in American Literature, 1790–1855 (New York 1992); “Can Fur Traders Have Feelings? Sentiment in Samuel Hearne’s Journey to the Northern Ocean (1795)” in Studies in Canadian Literature 37.2 (2012); and “‘Now Reader Read’: The Literary Ambitions of Henry Kelsey, Hudson’s Bay Company Clerk” in Early American Literature, 47.1 (2012).

Michael Harbsmeier has been Professor of Early Modern European History at Roskilde University. Having studied anthropology at the University of Copenhagen he concentrated his research on various traditions of travel writing. Starting with early modern German travel accounts (Wilde Völkerkunde, Frankfurt/New York 1994) he has been working on various European voyages and expeditions (Scientists and Scholars in the Field, edited with Kristian H. Nielsen and Christopher J. Ries, Aarhus 2012; Early Scientific Expeditions and Local Encounters, edited with Ib Friis and Jørgen Bæk Simonsen, Copenhagen 2013). In a Series of articles (and his Stimmen aus dem äussersten Norden, Stuttgart 2001) he has dealt with the accounts of travellers from the rest of the world to Europe from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. Now at the University of Copenhagen, he hopes to finish a book on images of Europe in the accounts of travellers from Greenland, Japan, China, India, Africa and various parts of the Muslim world.

Hanna Hodacs is a senior lecturer at the University of Dalarna. She previously worked as a Research Fellow at the University of Warwick; the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Stockholm, and the University of Uppsala. Her work has been concerned with different aspects of eighteenth century natural history, particularly education, travelling and material culture. She also worked extensively on the East India trade. Her latest book Silk and Tea in the North – Scandinavian Trade and the Market for Asian Goods in Eighteenth-Century Europe (Palgrave Macmillan 2016) stems from her work on the project “Europe’s Asian Centuries. Trading Eurasia 1700–1830” based at the Centre for Global History and Culture in Warwick.

Sharon Kinoshita is Professor of Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, specializing in medieval French literature, Mediterranean Studies, and the global Middle Ages. She is the author of Medieval Boundaries: Rethinking Difference in Old French Literature (Pennsylvania 2006), co-author of Marie de France: A Critical Companion (D. S. Brewer 2012), and co-editor of A Companion to Mediterranean History (Wiley Blackwell 2014). Her annotated translation of Marco Polo’s The Description of the World appeared in Hackett Press in 2016. Since 2006 she has co-directed (with Brian Catlos) multiple collaborative projects in Mediterranean Studies (www.mediterraneanseminar.org).

Dean MacCannell is Professor Emeritus of Environmental Design and Geography at the University of California at Davis. His book, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class has been continuously in print for 40 years and is published in 10 Languages. He frames his research as contributing to an ethnography of modernity and considers understanding tourism to be key to the larger project. He maintains a busy publishing and speaking schedule in retirement with recent lectures or workshops in Paris, Berlin, San Sebastian, Vienna, Athens, New York, Stanford, and Berkeley. His most recent book is The Ethics of Sightseeing (2011) and he is currently writing about heritage, sightseeing, and the symbolic.

Gesa Mackenthun is Professor of American Studies at RoStock University, Germany. Her publications include Fictions of the Black Atlantic in American Foundational Literature (2004), Metaphors of Dispossession. American Beginnings and the Translation of Empire, 1492–1637 (1997), and Sea Changes. Historicizing the Ocean (co-edited with Bernhard Klein, 2004). In 2006, she founded the graduate school “Cultural Encounters and the Discourses of Scholarship” at RoStock University (German Research Foundation) and has co-edited seven research volumes on various aspects of this problematic (including Entangled Knowledge. Scientific Discourses and Cultural Difference, 2012, and Fugitive Knowledge, 2015). Her current research deals with nineteenth-century travel and archaeology and the scientific construction of American antiquity.

Daniel Newman is Professor of Arabic and Head of the Arabic Department at Durham University. His research has centred on Arabic geographical and travel literature (with special focus on Arab travellers to Europe in the nineteenth century) as well as the Tunisian and Egyptian Nahda movements, on which he has published extensively. In 2009, he was the co-recipient of the World Award of the President of the Republic of Tunisia for Islamic Studies for the book enTitled Muslim Women in Law and Society. He is editor of the Series on “Makers of the Modern Middle East” (I.B. Tauris). His forthcoming books are Images and Representations: Tunisian Travellers to Europe in the 19th Century and Rifa’a al-Tahtawi: A Nineteenth-Century Egyptian Educationalist and Reformer.

Andrea Nicolas is a Social Anthropologist and postdoctoral researcher. She received her PhD from Free University Berlin. She has worked at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle and, in the realm of the International MaxNetAging Programme, for the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in RoStock, and has also been affiliated to the Graduate School of “Cultural Encounters and the Discourses of Scholarship” at the University of RoStock. In recent years, she has carried out extensive fieldwork in Northeast Africa, among the Oromo and Amhara groups of Ethiopia. Her research interests include communication, ritual, age, generation, mediation and conflict resolution, along with issues of discourse analysis, comparative research and research methodology. She is the author of the book From Process to Procedure: Elders’ mediation and formality in Central Ethiopia (Wiesbaden 2011), and co-editor of the volume Growing up, Growing old: Trajectories of Time and Lives (Oxford 2013, with Ian Flaherty).

Lukasz Wierzbicki is author of children’s books and redactor of travel literature, living near Poznan, in Poland. In 2000 he rediscovered and published the long time forgotten letters of Kazimierz Nowak from his journey on bicycle through Colonial Africa. The book Across the Dark Continent by Bicycle and on Foot became a classic of Polish travel literature. In 2008 Wierzbicki published a children’s book about the African adventures of Kazimierz Nowak called Kazik’s Africa. He is also the author of books about Wojtek, the soldier bear from the Polish army in World War II, about Giovanni da Pian del Carpine and Benedictus Polonus, the first men from Europe who traveled to the heart of the Mongolian Empire in the thirteenth century and about Halina Korolec-Bujakowska, the girl who made a ride on a motorbike across Asia in the 1930’s. All the stories he tells in his books are based on true events.

Stephanie Wodianka is Professor of Romance Literature at RoStock University, Germany since 2010. Her research interests – documented in several monographies and books – include representations, practices and theories of the collective memory (littérature, films, chanson française), the European meditative literature of the seventeenth century, the relations between aesthetics and the construction of (trans)cultural identities (especially in the context of the Grand tour), and concepts and poetics of modern myth. Since 2013 she has been chairing the interdisciplinary doctoral program on Cultural Encounters and the Discourses of Scholarship, and she is currently working on a project on cultural semiotics of the cardinal directions, Localisations de l’Europe: sémiotiques culturelles des points cardinaux, edited by Stephanie Wodianka and Sebastian Neumeister (2016).

Friedrich Wolfzettel, professeur émérite à l’Université Goethe de Francfort sur le Main. Études de philologie anglo-saxone, romane et slave à l’Université de Heidelberg; thèse de promotion à Heidelberg en 1969 sur le thème: Michel Butor und der Kollektivroman; assistant de recherche à l’Université de Giessen (Répertoire métrique de la poésie lyrique française des origines à 1350); habilitation en 1973; professeur de philologie romane à l’Université de Giessen de 1972–1988; professeur titulaire de philologie romane à l’Université Goethe de 1988–2007; professeur étranger aux universités de Bielefeld, Siegen, Constance et Mendoza (Argentine); président de la section allemande de la Société Internationale Arthurienne de 1982–2007; président de la Société Internationale Arthurienne de 1990–1993 et président honoraire; coéditeur de la collection mimesis (Tübingen) de 1985–2007 et coéditeur de l’encyclopédie historique Ästhetische Grundbegriffe (7 vol., Stuttgart 2000–2005); coéditeur de la collection Schriften der Internationalen Artusgesellschaft (Giessen/Tübingen/Berlin/New York, 1984).

Das breite Panorama des Bandes lässt zwei Entwicklungen in der transdisziplinären AuseinanderSetzung mit postkolonialer Theorie erkennen: Erstens wenden sich viele Beiträge von der Vorstellung ab, den mobilen Reisenden stünden lokal gebundene „Bereiste“gegenüber.[…] Die Umkehrung des kolonialen Blicks durch die Frage, wie außerhalb Europas Wissen über die Welt gewonnen wurde, hat hier besondere Bedeutung. Zweitens illustrieren mehrere Kapitel, welche Einsichten sich aus einer Abkehr von der pauschalen Verurteilung europäischer ReiSetexte als kolonialistisch gewinnen lassen. Auch europäische Reisende der kolonialen Ära fanden sich immer wieder in der prekären Position kultureller Mittler. Dies darf bei aller gebotenen Kritik am ausbeuterischen Charakter des Kolonialismus nicht außer Acht gelassen werden.
Die Beiträge des Bandes bilden insgesamt sehr gut die Vielfalt der Reiseforschung und die Herausforderungen ab, die sich aus interdisziplinären Dialogen zu diesem Feld des Kulturkontakts ergeben. – Anke Fischer-Kattner auf: sehepunkte.de