Inaugural Lecture: Professor Wendy Bracewell (SSEES)

 13 November 2012

Title: Travel accounts and travel polemics in 18th-century Europe

What happens when people read foreign travel accounts about their own societies?  What recourse do they have, if they disagree with the way that they are represented?  In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries a considerable number of such readers, from all around Europe, put down their books in disgust, took up their pens and wrote responses.  These travel polemics have much to say about the influence of travel writing, about the role of the Republic of Letters in a divided Europe, even about the idea of Europe itself.

Biography

Wendy Bracewell was born in Australia, grew up in northern California, and attended university and graduate school at Stanford.  Trained as an East Europeanist and early modern historian, she studies the social and cultural history of the Balkans.  She has published works on a variety of topics, including piracy and frontier warfare in the sixteenth-century Adriatic, nationalism and ideas of masculinity, and travel writing and the concept of Europe. 

This event is free but registration is required. To book your place please visit eventbrite

The lecture will be followed by a drinks reception at 7.30 in the Wilkins Garden Room.