Mapping: texts and travels

• Grant number: 18/20324-9
• Support Opportunities: Research Grants - Visiting Researcher Grant - International
• Start date: May 06, 2019
• End date: May 20, 2019
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - History
• Principal Investigator: Denise Aparecida Soares de Moura
• Grantee: Denise Aparecida Soares de Moura
• Visiting researcher: Jordana Dym
• Visiting researcher institution: Skidmore College, United States
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Ciências Humanas e Sociais (FCHS). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de Franca. Franca , SP, Brazil

Abstract

Mapping, Text and Travel is project that will examine the interplay between mapping and the history and literary culture of travel from the fifteenth through the twentieth centuries, from manuscript to print to screen. Led by Jordana Dym (Professor of History, Skidmore College), will be examined the relationship between mapping, wayfinding, describing, and narrating the experience of travel as manifested in separately published maps and atlases, guidebooks, travel narratives, and travel fiction. Drawing on recent scholarship in travel history and literature and the history of cartography, digitized map collections and the university's library holdings in cartography, travel, exploration, and related materials, the activities will cover a topic that is, surprisingly, largely overlooked by travel studies, which tends to focus on the interpretation of texts while paying little more than superficial attention to maps, and by map historians who separately analyze cartography of exploration and discovery from that of leisure. Dr. Dym will lead the seminar, building on her past and current research, on my recent research on the field supported by São Paulo Research Foundation (proc. n. 2015/21136-3) that put in dialogue diaries of soldiers and the first visual representation of the Sertões of the Meridional Brazil in the 18th century as part of the process of the Portuguese sovereign and its right of lands on this landscape. She will be guided also by readings of recent scholarship in a broad range of humanities and social science fields, including geography, literary and cultural studies, travel history, colonial and postcolonial history, and the histories of cartography and art. The activities of the project Mapping, Text, and Travel seeks to stimulate the development of new scholarship and perspectives on the complex relationship between text, map, and travel from the emergence of the modern world in the fifteenth century to the dawn of the digital age in the twentieth. Following a roughly chronological program, the project will have three principle goals. First, they will introduce the genres of travel mapping and situate them within the wider context of the history of cartography. Second, they will survey and review frameworks for interpretation of maps for and by travelers and maps' relationship to text and other dimensions of travel writing. Finally, they will situate the development of travel cartography within the history of travel and the development of travel publications, such as narratives, guidebooks, and advertising. The project will offer participants an opportunity to cross disciplinary, regional, and chronological boundaries to reflect on the ways in which mapping has shaped travelers' imagination and the experience of place and landscape, of identity and history, and of time and space. (AU)