Correspondence: Travel, Writing, and Literatures of Exploration, c. 1750–c. 1850

7–10 April 2010, University of Edinburgh and National Library of Scotland

Theme | Speakers | Programme | Reports |Organizers

Theme

The University of Edinburgh (Institute of Geography and Centre for the History of the Book), in collaboration with the National Library of Scotland, was pleased to host “Correspondence: travel, writing, and literatures of exploration, c. 1750–c.1850”—a four-day, interdisciplinary conference concerned with travel, travel writing, and the associated literatures of exploration.

In bringing together scholarly perspectives from geography, book history, literary studies, and the history of science, the conference sought to interrogate the relationship between travel, exploration, and publishing in order better to understand how knowledge acquired ‘in the field’ became, through a series of material and epistemic translations, knowledge on the page. Plenary speakers included Elizabeth Bohls (University of Oregon), Joyce Chaplin (Harvard University), Tim Fulford (Nottingham Trent University), and Nigel Leask (University of Glasgow). The conference addressd travellers’ inscriptive practices; travellers’ credibility and the veracity of written accounts; and the correspondence between manuscript and print.

Speakers

Programme

The final conference programme can be viewed (3.8MB) as a PDF document.

Reports

The work of the conference has been described in reports written by Annaliese J. Bateman (Journal of Historical Geography 36, 3 (2010): 342–343) and Li-hsin Hsu (Historical Geography Research Group Newsletter, summer (2010): 7).

Organizers