Semester:
Offered:
Instructor: Reed Gochberg
Meeting time: Wednesday, 3:00 - 5:00
This seminar will consider the relationship between science, exploration, and empire in nineteenth-century American culture. Throughout the semester, we will discuss how expeditions to South America, the Pacific, and the Arctic played a major role in shaping ideas about nature and culture around the globe. Newspapers speculated about the mysterious fates of lost voyages; museums displayed specimens and objects from faraway places; and novelists depicted the thrill and adventure of imagined journeys. By reading works by Olaudah Equiano, Charles Darwin, Herman Melville, Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton, and Pauline Hopkins alongside periodicals and material artifacts, we will trace how exploration informed broader understandings of race, gender, and cultural exchange in an era of national expansion.