Description
This workshop focuses on significant theoretical and methodological developments in the interdisciplinary field of travel studies and reflects on the directions that it might take next. We will consider the legacies of the New Historicist and postcolonial approaches which shaped the study of travel in the 1980s and 1990s before turning to the insights and provocations offered by more recent scholarship rooted in feminist, queer, Black, migration, and decolonial studies. With these various theories and methods in mind, we will examine items drawn from the Newberry Library’s extensive collection of materials on travel, including maps. In doing so, we will discuss the questions these materials raise about issues at the heart of travel studies, such as the relationship of knowledge and power, different forms of positionality and perspective, the challenges of translation and comparison, and the definition of “travel” itself.