This conference will discuss scientific travel writing 1750-1850 as a "verschollene Wissenschaft" – a genre that that no longer exists in the same form today but once had high claims to scientific status as a form of ethnographic observation. It will focus on the relationship between science and art in this genre, discussing both its historical significance and its relevance to cultural sciences today.

The scholarly context for this topic is a multi-disciplinary revival of interest in scientific travel writing. Historians, anthropologists, and literary scholars have turned to travel writing as a starting-point for the study of cultural contacts. Long neglected because it fell between disciplines, scientific travel writing has attracted fresh attention precisely for its mercurial synthesis of now-disparate approaches to culture.

Concept: Harry Liebersohn (Univ. of Illinois at Urbana Champaign/History)

Participants: Vanessa Agnew (Univ. of Michigan/German Studies), Hans Erich Bödeker (Max-Planck-Institut für Geschichte, Göttingen), James A. Boon (Princeton Univ./Anthropology), Philippe Despoix (Univ. de Montréal/Études européennes), Thomas Fröschl (Univ. of Vienna/History), Christa Riedl-Dorn (Museum of Natural History, Vienna), Sigrid Wadauer (Historian, Vienna), Gotthart Wunberg (IFK)

Program and abstracts available at the website.

Friday, June 14

• Harry Liebersohn: Introduction
• Philippe Despoix: Scientific, Literary and Political Discourses in the South-Seas Travel-Accounts (1765-1785)
• Vanessa Agnew: The Earwitness in the Travelogue
• Hans Erich Bödeker: Reiseinstruktionen und die Entstehung einer „Wissenschaft vom Menschen“ im ausgehenden 18. Jahrhundert
• Harry Liebersohn: The Travel Diary in the Network of Knowledge,1750-1850

Saturday, June 15

• Sigrid Wadauer: Craftwork: How hardship becomes adventure
• James A. Boon: Intersensory Travel-writing as Scientific Dandyism: Select Episodes

  Plenary Discussion