Traveling Bodies Exposed

The Traveling Body Under Stress: Isabella Bird’s The Yangtze Valley and Beyond (1899)

The famous Victorian woman explorer Isabella Bird (1831-1904) was acutely aware that her travelling was an embodied experience, in terms of both health and gender. Her very first journeys abroad, to North America in 1854, were undertaken because her doctor thought they would improve the spinal complaint from which she suffered as a young woman. As gendered, her body was susceptible to norms of femininity which restricted women’s mobility, solo travel in particular, and regulated the display of the female body. Bird dared to travel unaccompanied (apart from the servants and guides she employed during her expeditions), but her accounts reveal how sensitive she was to the fact that travel might expose her to bodily harm – directed at her as a woman but also at her as a European traveller.

This awareness of physical vulnerability comes to the fore in Bird’s account of her travels in China in 1896, when she was sixty-four and felt the physical stress of travelling at an advanced age. “I am too old for hardships and great exertions now,” she had written the previous year to her publisher Murray, and a photograph of the author taken during the journey does not conceal her age and fragile health. Furthermore, The Yangtze Valley and Beyond (1899) narrates how the integrity of Bird’s body was threatened and she was actually assaulted at a time when Chinese-European relations were particularly strained.

The paper’s approach draws on body, postcolonial and mobility studies as well as studies of Victorian femininity.

Bio note:

Barbara Korte is (retired) professor at the English Department, University of Freiburg, with a special research interest in travel writing. Her recent publications in this field include: Travel, Writing and the Media (Routledge 2022) and Travel in Victorian Periodicals, 1850-1900 (Palgrave Macmillan 2024).

Narrated and Narrative (In)vulnerability in Travel Writing by Mothers Travelling with their Children

Through three case studies, this paper will shed light on different ways in which travelling mothers have addressed their own vulnerability and that of their children in their travel writing, as they partook in a genre long dominated and shaped by men and tropes of masculinity. The diachronic approach will highlight the ontological dimension of vulnerability, while evincing specificities since “the body is simultaneously a historical, natural, technical, discursive and material entity” (Harraway 1991, 209) and therefore “a site of practices, comportments and contested articulations” (Bray and Colebrook 1998, 37). In Lucy Atkinson’s Recollections of the Tartar Steppes and their Inhabitants (1863), while her pregnant body is obfuscated, her narrative superimposes the portrait of a weaker vessel with that of an extraordinary force of nature, of vulnerability with resilience, as she travelled Siberia with her husband by sledge, carriage and horseback—eventually leading to her premature delivery of a baby boy. Published a decade later, Annie Brassey’s A Voyage in the Sunbeam (1878) opens with the near-loss of the children, almost thrown overboard not long after they set off. Brassey’s dramatization of this episode, through narrative pacing and the insertion of illustrations, turns the vulnerability of these unusual sailors into a celebration of the British spirit, as she dovetails adventure and modernity. Finally, this paper will discuss Louise Erdrich’s candid narrative of the vulnerability she experiences as the travelling mother of an 18-month-old baby in Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country (2003). Her fear of dying and leaving her child motherless revitalises the traditional tension between fact and fiction in travel writing, as fantasies of capsizing or slipping off a cliff become as much part of the travelling experience as their actual safe journey through the land of her ancestors.

Bio note:

Anne‑Florence Quaireau is a Senior Lecturer in British literature at the University of Angers (France). She specialises in nineteenth‑century women’s travel writing and has published several articles and chapters on the subject. Her monograph Le Féminin en partage: le récit de voyage d’Anna Jameson au Canada (Sorbonne Université Presses, 2022) was finalist for the 2023 Joint Book Prize of the French Society for the Study of English (SAES) and French Association for American Studies (AFEA). She has co‑edited a special issue of Studies in Travel Writing on exceptions and exceptionality, and Twenty-First-Century Perspectives on British Travel Writing: Decentring Epistemologies (Routledge 2025), which won the 2026 SELVA Book Award. Her current research project is on mothers travelling with their children, and on child travel.

At One: The Body and the Machine in Motorcycle Travel Narratives

Bio note:

Timothy Youngs is Professor Emeritus of English and Travel Studies at Nottingham Trent University. He specializes in travel writing, with a focus on African American travel narratives and radical travel texts. He co-edits the monograph series Routledge Research in Travel Writing and Cambridge Elements: Travel Writing. His recent works include The Cambridge History of Travel Writing and The Ashgate Research Companion to Travel Writing. His publications include Touching Distance and Transmission Blues.

Eighteenth-Century Vulnerability: Mary Wortley Montagu’s Travels to the Ottoman Empire

This paper is part of a book project entitled Bodies of Knowledge, which is situated at the intersection of medicine with literary studies. The book discusses the role of women as producers and objects of medical knowledge in the eighteenth century and engages theories of embodiment and the intersectional identities of sex, race, and ability. In the early eighteenth century, Mary Wortley Montagu traveled to the Ottoman Empire, accompanying her husband who was an English ambassador. During her travels, Mary Montagu kept an active correspondence with friends and family members; the collection of these letters is commonly referred to as the Turkish Embassy Letters.

Mary Montagu’s correspondence details the effects of her travels across the European continent and to Constantinople on her body. As a woman traveling through unfamiliar territory, both geographically and culturally, she undergoes numerous physical challenges. In addition, her encounter with Ottoman forms of female embodiment leads her to question English gender norms, especially with respect to the shaping and weakening of women’s bodies through restrictive corsets and whalebone stays.  Montagu’s body was particularly vulnerable to the challenges of travel because she had contracted smallpox several years earlier. Physically and emotionally scarred by the disease, she witnessed the Ottoman practice of smallpox inoculation and became its active proponent, thereby playing an important role in eighteenth-century discussions about public health and vaccination. The body of her letters is shaped by her corporeal state at the time of writing. She repeatedly reflects on her body’s vulnerability in the context of travel and the different modes of (female) embodiment that she witnesses in the Ottoman empire. As an example of eighteenth-century epistolary expressions of vulnerability, Mary Montagu’s writing demonstrates the tensions experienced by the traveling female body in a colonial context.

Bio note:

Stephanie M. Hilger is Professor of Comparative Literature and German at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she also holds an appointment in the Carle Illinois College of Medicine. Her research puts the study of eighteenth-century European culture into dialogue with the Health Humanities. She is the author of Women Write Back: Strategies of Response and the Dynamics of European Literary Culture, 1790-1805 (2009), Gender and Genre: German Women Write the French Revolution (2014), and Medicalizing Difference: The Eighteenth-Century Construction of the “Hermaphrodite” (2024). She has also edited New Directions in Literature and Medicine Studies (2017) and The Health Humanities in German Studies (2024); and co-edited The Early History of Embodied Cognition (2015) and Bodies in Transition in the Health Humanities (2019). Her new research explores eighteenth-century medicine as a humanistic interdiscipline by discussing physician-writers, the role of women as producers and objects of medical knowledge, and the centrality of the bodies of racial others in medical discourse.

“Pray do not risk your health nor your life on the Matterhorn”: Knowledge-Making and Vulnerability in 19^th-Century Geological Travel Writing

Of all the natural sciences in the nineteenth century, geology was one of the physically most demanding. Fieldwork excursions involved descending into mineshafts, scaling peaks or traversing difficult terrain: as contemporary handbooks stressed, geology was not for lightweights. This robustness was particularly tested as the sub-discipline of glaciology emerged, which addressed how Europe’s glacial past had shaped its present-day contours, and debated the possible mechanisms that underpinned glacial movement as witnessed in the Alpine regions of Switzerland and France. Numerous scientific papers circulating from the 1830s in western Europe amongst glacial theory specialists essentially downplayed the risks in gathering factual evidence central to scientific knowledge-making. Yet in private correspondence and in travel accounts aimed at lay readers, the same scientific authors presented themselves as ‘vulnerable’ knowledge-makers – both physically in the efforts required to make accurate, tenable measurements ‘in the field’, and professionally in their defence of new and speculative theories.

James D. Forbes, credited with launching Scottish mountaineering and a foremost British specialist on glaciology, ostensibly used the Travels through the Alps of Savoy (1843) to promote his ideas on the progressive motion of glaciers, their speed of travel and structure. But opening remarks on the importance of style in scientific writing signal his own awareness of the rhetorical power of playing with nuanced notions of danger – and on the psychology of risk (Breakwell 2014) – to forge a relationship with his readers underpinned by a politics of affect (Ahmed 2004). Correspondence with fellow geologists, in which he warned them of the hazards associated with Alpine climbing, signal his awareness of vulnerability as a universal trait (Bonacchi 2024), and of a need to respect this within his knowledge community.

Bio note:

Alison E. Martin is Professor of British Studies at the Johannes Gutenberg Universität-Mainz in Germany, and works at the faculty in Germersheim, which specialises in Translation Studies and Interpreting. She has published widely on travel writing, from the 18^th century to the present day, with a particular focus on scientific writing and gender. Her most recent monograph, Nature Translated: Alexander von Humboldt’s Works in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Edinburgh University Press, 2018), explores the role played by Humboldt’s female translators in the transmission of scientific knowledge to a general audience in the 19^th century.

Vulnerability in the heights: 19^th-century female travellers in the Pyrenees

During the 19th century, Spain was widely regarded as a dangerous destination for travellers, not only because of its lack of modernity and political instability, but also due to its difficult accessibility. Travellers entering by land had little alternative but to cross the Pyrenees, a mountain range perceived as both a physical and a cultural frontier. However, once across the border, most of them continued their journey across the country, whereas only a few ventured further into the mountains themselves. In such cases, a different kind of danger emerged: harsh weather conditions, difficult mountain passes, and an untamed natural environment transformed the journey into an embodied experience in which exhaustion and the awareness of one’s own vulnerability became central to the act of travelling.

Such is the case of Clara von Glümer and Mary Eyre, whose travelogues offer unique accounts of Spain in the mid-nineteenth century. While Glümer’s Aus den Pyrenäen (1854) focuses on her experience in the Pyrenean borderlands between France and Spain, in Over the Pyrenees into Spain (1865), Eyre recounts her solo journey through the eastern Pyrenees on her way into Spain. In both narratives, vulnerability emerges as a central category that is partly inherent to the mountain environment but at times also situational, given the traveller’s gender and the political and cultural circumstances in Spain.

In this paper, I aim to analyse how danger and vulnerability are conveyed in Glümer’s and Eyre’s travel accounts. Rather than approaching vulnerability as a predefined theoretical concept, I intend to examine how it emerges at the intersection of gender, embodied mobility, and the material conditions of mountain travel. By comparing Glümer’s and Eyre’s accounts, this paper also asks whether different cultural backgrounds produce distinct ways of narrating vulnerability and agency.

Bio note:

Mireia Vives Martínez holds a B.A. in English Studies (2016) and a B.A. in Modern Languages and their Literatures (2018), as well as a PhD in Literatures and Cultures (2022) from the Universitat de València (UV). Since October 2023 she works as an Assistant Professor in the Department of English and German at the same university. She’s a member of the research group RIALE (Relaciones Interculturales Alemania-España). Her research interests include issues of female agency in German literature, and intercultural relations between Germany and Spain based on the accounts of nineteenth-century German women travellers to Spain.

Ascending to Continuity: Vulnerability, Affect, and the Remaking of Self in John Muir’s Mountains of California

^{"I was suddenly brought to a dead stop, with arms outspread, clinging close to the face of the rock, unable to move hand or foot either up or down. My doom appeared fixed." – John Muir, The Mountains of California (1894)}

The paralysis recorded above, which overtook John Muir midway through his ascent of Mount Ritter in October 1872, marks the collapse of the naturalist's trained composure into acute bodily crisis: "My mind seemed to fill with a stifling smoke," Muir writes; but the breakdown, is quickly succeeded by a return of movement "with preternatural clearness" and by what he terms "a new sense." There is a significant gap in scholarship on the corporeal dimensions of Muir’s writings. Previous readings focus on his rhetoric of wilderness or transcendence, neglecting the vulnerable body through which both are mediated.

Muir's ascent constitutes an instance of “extreme travel” (Burroughs, 2019), in which corporeality and environmental extremity converge to produce the sublime not at contemplative distance but as proximate danger. His paralysis exemplifies precisely the reaction constitutive of the concept: fear operates as a prenoetic bodily affect that collapses the sensory-motor contingency between traveler and mountain (cf. Bower and Gallagher, 2016). This bodily breakdown, however, functions as a liminal threshold rather than an endpoint: What emerges is a new sense of self, brought forth at a moment of extreme vulnerability or exhaustion, and constituted in close resonance and continuity with nature. Crucially, the dissolution operates upon the boundary between self and other, not upon the body itself. It is precisely the body, moving now with “a positiveness and precision” Muir attributes to the ‘new self’, that becomes the medium of sublime experience, thus reembodying the transcendentalist topos of self-loss. Muir's ascent thereby exemplifies the ontological nature of vulnerability by demonstrating how it is manifested, and intensified, through the encounter with a nonhuman other in the form of sublime wilderness.

Bio note:

Ricardo Bloch is a Doctoral Candidate and Lecturer in the Department of English and American Studies at the University of Koblenz. He is a member of the international research network Traveling Bodies and of the Koblenz Research Unit Body • Travel • Literature. His dissertation examines the traveling body in John Muir's nature writing as a medium of aesthetic and spiritual experience and its encounter with the American wilderness as an active, nonhuman Other. His research interests include Ecocriticism, travel writing and the body, Nature Writing and the mountain sublime.

Between Agency and Precarity: Vulnerability in Freda Du Faur’s The Conquest of Mount Cook and Other Climbs: An Account of Four Seasons’ Mountaineering on the Southern Alps of New Zealand (1915)

This paper explores the intersecting dimensions of vulnerability in The Conquest of Mount Cook and Other Climbs by mountaineer and writer Freda Du Faur. Through an affect-oriented and phenomenological reading, it argues that vulnerability persists in different forms throughout the narrative, extending beyond physical danger.

Society is framed as imposing behavioural and spatial limitations on women. Social vulnerability emerges even before the climb and resurfaces when a return to the lodge is anticipated. Before embarking on climbs, Du Faur faces scrutiny and is warned not only of the dangers, but also of the reputational risks she faces as a woman.

During the climb, the body is placed between agency and precarity. The mountains become a place of resistance, where restrictive gender norms and societal expectations can be suspended, as the setting requires a focus on fundamental bodily necessities. Breaking with these expectations, however, does not eliminate vulnerability. The physical risks foreground the body’s material limits. Du Faur must adapt to unstable conditions, and the summit does not end vulnerability, as the descent always remains ahead.

This constant undercurrent of danger is also thrilling to her, as she deliberately seeks challenge, expressing disappointment when routes require less effort or involve less risk. While the mountain exposes her body to danger, society exposes her to scrutiny. On returning to the lodge, Du Faur is once again expected to conform. Preparing to re-enter society, she remains highly conscious of her physical appearance and conduct, highlighting the performative aspect of identity.

Thus, vulnerability emerges not simply as a consequence of mountaineering, but as the condition that makes mobility, and in this case, a fleeting liberation from society possible. Rather than a temporary state to be overcome, vulnerability remains an ongoing condition that shapes experience and narration before, during and after the climb.

Bio note:

Hannah Schwehm is a PhD candidate and lecturer at the Faculty of Translation Studies, Linguistics, and Cultural Studies at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (Germersheim). Her doctoral research investigates the corporeal dimension of British women’s narratives about colonial New Zealand with a focus on the complex interplay between motion and stasis. Her broader research interests include travel writing, postcolonial studies (specifically within the context of Aotearoa New Zealand), feminist theory and gender studies. She holds an M.A. in Translation, for which she analysed representations of women and feminist discourse in contemporary Spanish television.

Extreme Travel and the Concealment of Indigenous Vulnerability in Mary Rowlandson’s The Sovereignty and Goodness of God (1682)

This paper focuses on Mary Rowlandson’s well-known colonial classic, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God (1682), one of the earliest and most influential narratives of (forced) mobility in U.S.-American literature. While this text has traditionally been read as a paradigmatic account of female captivity and vulnerability—focusing largely on the narrator’s suffering, agency, gender, and religious subjectivity—this paper argues that scholarship has paid insufficient attention to a central tension between the embodied vulnerability of the traveling colonial subject and the structural vulnerability of the Indigenous “travelees”. This tension is largely obscured by the religious framework of the narrative, which transforms Rowlandson’s captivity among members of several allied Indigenous communities—including Wampanoag, Nipmuc, and Narragansett groups during King Philip's War/Metacom’s Rebellion (1676)—into a narrative of spiritual trials and tribulations. While Rowlandson’s retroactive account of forced “extreme” mobility foregrounds the bodily vulnerability of the Puritan captive, it simultaneously—and largely unintentionally—documents the vulnerability of the Indigenous communities among whom she travels. A reading against the ideological grain of this particular travel text demonstrates how narratives of mobility not only document bodily vulnerability but also participate in regimes of representation that render Indigenous suffering visible only as the background to colonial experiences and desires. Furthermore, reading Rowlandson’s text through theories of vulnerability and embodiment illustrates how Indigenous bodies emerge as doubly exposed: materially through colonial violence and representationally through their incorporation into a travel narrative that denies them narrative authority. Such a reading, then, seeks to contribute to a growing body of scholarship on how travel narratives produce asymmetries of voice, visibility, and vulnerability.

Bio note:

Marc Priewe studied English and Political Science at the University of Hannover and received his PhD from the University of Potsdam in 2005. He held research and teaching positions at UC Irvine, St. Lawrence University, The New School, Harvard University, and the University of Duisburg-Essen. Since 2012 he has served as Associate Professor and, since 2017, as Full Professor and Chair of American Studies at the University of Stuttgart. His main publications include Writing Transit: Refiguring National Imaginaries in Chicana/o Narratives (2007), Imagined Transnationalism: U.S-Latino/a Literature, Culture, and Identity (2009, ed.), Textualizing Illness: Medicine and Culture in New England, 1620-1730 (2014), and Crossroads in American Studies: Transnational and Biocultural Encounters (2016, ed.). His main research interests lie in Early American Studies, Medicine and Literature, Transnational American Studies, Digital Humanities, and popular cultures in the United States.

Vulnerable Bodies and Colonial Encounters: Georg Forster’s Negotiation of Ambivalences in A Voyage Round the World (1777)

This paper examines the German-Polish naturalist Georg Forster’s account of Cook’s second voyage, A Voyage Round the World (1777), as a significant example of the ambivalent representation of bodily vulnerability in Enlightenment scientific travel writing. Forster’s narrative offers a particularly productive case in three interconnected respects:

First, it foregrounds the multi-dimensional and multi-subjective nature of corporeal vulnerability with its complex tensions in colonial encounters. On the one hand, Forster describes the physical and psychological threats confronting European explorers, while documenting their strategies to cope with them. On the other hand, he directs attention to the violence inflicted by them upon Pacific Islanders in the name of scientific inquiry, which is frequently highly gendered and racialized. A striking example is his account of New Zealand women who were forced into prostitution with European sailors through local and colonial power dynamics.

Second, Forster’s reflections on the vulnerability oscillate between affirmation and critique of European civilization. He admires the sailors’ courage and pursuit of knowledge, portraying them as individuals who endure extreme vulnerability to overcome natural obstacles and accomplish civilizing mission of European expansion. Meanwhile, he strongly criticizes the violence and exploitation accompanying colonial encounters, and attributes them to the arrogance and greed of the Europeans.

Third, Forster explores the complex entanglement of the vulnerability of different bodies. He suggests that the sailors’ violent behaviors are partly a consequence of their own psychological vulnerability, as the arduous journey may exacerbate their inexorability. Moreover, his narrative destabilizes the rigid perpetrator-victim-distinction by demonstrating that European explorers, too, could become vulnerable due to theft by Pacific Islanders.

Thus, Forster’s travelogue critically negotiates Enlightenment ambivalences in the vulnerability discourse and remains highly relevant for contemporary reflections on postcolonial cross-cultural encounters.

Bio note:

Haoying Zhang is a PhD student in modern German literature at the Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School of Literary Studies at the Free University of Berlin. Her research interests include the intersections of literature and science, German nature writing and German literature of the 18th century. She is currently working on her doctoral thesis on sea and seafaring in the German literature of the long 18th century.

Fragile Explorers, Indigenous Bodies: Mobility and Vulnerability in Alaskan Travel Narratives

In his memoir of Alaska, Russian explorer Zakhar Chichinov recalls a moment when “the men were too weak to kill sea lions,” admitting that “all we could do was to crawl around the cliffs and gather some eggs and suck them raw.” Far removed from heroic narratives of conquest and discovery, such accounts foreground the bodily vulnerability that shaped travel in the North Pacific. This paper examines how travel narratives from Russian and American Alaska expose mobility as a precarious achievement conditioned by illness, hunger, exhaustion, climatic extremes, and dependence on Indigenous expertise.

Drawing on personal accounts, dictated memoirs, and colonial records from the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, I argue that corporeal vulnerability constituted not an exceptional disruption of travel but one of its fundamental conditions. Building on Judith Butler’s theorization of vulnerability as a fundamental yet unevenly distributed condition of embodied existence and on recent work in archipelagic American studies, the paper reads Alaskan mobility as a relational and precarious practice rather than as heroic movement through empty space. Through a comparative analysis of Russian and Western travel narratives, I show that exploration depended upon Indigenous guides, hunters, navigators, and laborers whose embodied knowledge enabled movement across coasts, islands, and maritime routes. While colonial narratives frequently marginalized these actors, they simultaneously reveal the fragility of the supposedly autonomous explorer.

The paper reconceptualizes Indigenous guides as infrastructural bodies that sustained colonial circulation across the Alaskan archipelago. Russian Alaska emerges not as a remote frontier conquered by resilient adventurers, but as a relational archipelago in which mobility depended upon bodily exposure, environmental precarity, and Indigenous expertise. In doing so, the paper shifts attention from exploration as heroic discovery to the vulnerable conditions that made travel possible in the first place.

Bio note:

Steffen Wöll is a postdoctoral researcher who has published on various and intersectional topics in American Studies, including digital humanities and mapmaking, spatial imaginations, border studies, naturalism, postmodernism, as well as film and horror studies. His current studies investigate the transoceanic dynamics of the United States’ imperial and literary discourses.
_{A complete list of publications is available at https://steffenwoell.github.io/publications.}

Reviewers of Travel Writing as Mediators of Vulnerability in the Early Athenaeum (1830-1840)

Victorian periodicals were crucial in the construction of personal, regional, national, as well as supranational identities. The Athenaeum (1828-1921) was a seminal journal that published review articles and essays on language, literature, the arts, history, and the sciences. Travel writing, especially in the form of reviews of recently published travel narratives, were a substantial part of its content. Grounding itself in the imagined places of Antiquity, the journal was an heir of 18th-century cosmopolitan editorial and journalistic practices, and saw its readers as ‘citizens of the world’. Since the editorial agenda was to further the moral improvement of the readers, the Athenaeum wished to stimulate reflection on fruitful intellectual development and social responsibility. The definition, assessment, and discussion of different forms of vulnerability are necessarily integral to the conception of the nature, resilience, and intercultural outlook of the human being constructed in and by the Athenaeum.

For many readers, reviews would have been their only contact with a book. This paper argues that reviewers, by evaluating, retelling, and quoting from travel literature, made conscious selections as to what angles to foreground, what anecdotes to share, what passages to present, and what vision of the traveller and the local to communicate to the readers. Through this reframing, reviewers fostered or precluded identification with the narrators, travellers, or locals encountered. The display of vulnerability was essential in the characterisation of these agents, as well as in the relationship the reviewers sought to construct. I will examine the ways in which vulnerability, as framed by the reviewers, renders underlying power relations, accentuates or questions views of Englishness, and delineates a spectrum of competence and frailty. I will look at an average of 20 reviews of travel literature for each year between 1830 and 1840.

Bio note:

Dr. Anne-Marie Millim is Associate Professor in English Studies at the University of Luxembourg. Her research focuses on Victorian literature and early 20th-century multilingual Luxembourgish writing. She has published on life-writing, national identity, national literatures, as well as the genres of the press (feuilleton, newspaper poetry, and book review).

Slippery bodies: Socialist physicality and bodies of/in water in Soviet travelogues after 1953.

In the USSR, the concept of ‘turizm’ encapsulated healthy, active travel, ‘a form of mass action through doing’ (Gorsuch, 2011, 7). The body was not supposed to rest passively, but instead engage in highly structured, communal leisure, a common trend in the Soviet organisation of free time (Oberländer, 2017). Soviet accounts of travel thus often focused on physical activities, such as mountaineering with its linear, collective, intrepid achievement (Maurer 2006; 2009; 2020), with nature both a giver of health (e.g. Conterio, 2014), and something to be mastered in Soviet travelogues.

A form of travel which could trouble this intrepid, collectivist mode was travel on, through or in water. In Soviet political and scientific discourse, water was typically something irrational that had to be harnessed and tamed through hydro-electric dams and canals (Ruder, 2018; Peterson, 2019). Swampy landscapes in Mary Louise Pratt’s analysis of travelogues meanwhile can problematise male colonial travelogues: there is no vertical mastering gaze from above, and there is no easy path to be cut through a swamp (Pratt, 2008, 209). The body is compromised: it enters the swamp but the swamp also inevitably clings to and enters the body.

Through an analysis of how watery landscapes and vulnerability interact in Soviet journalistic travelogues, this paper will examine Soviet gender hierarchies and broader power structures, and add nuance to the historiography of the Soviet environment as being defined by the logical, rational, masculinist attempt to tame a wild, threatening, feminised nature (Trotsky, 1924). Water seeps, spreads, flows in unexpected ways; it has the power to both threaten and delight the travelling body with its unpredictability, and to destabilise assumptions and existing power structures. This paper will explore how the travelling Soviet body in contemporary travelogues responds to the challenges and potentials of the watery landscape. 

Bio note:

Catherine Mullier is a first year History PhD student at the University of Warwick funded by the Wheeler History of Travel Writing Scholarship. Her work focuses on written and audiovisual depictions of travel in the Soviet Union after 1953, with an especial interest in how these travelogues reveal Soviet power hierarchies of nationality, ethnicity, and gender, and how they depict and interact with the Soviet environment.

Narrating Posthuman Vulnerability in Contemporary Travel Writing

Twenty-first-century travel writing increasingly departs from the secure positioning of the detached observer in the encounter between the travelling body and the more-than-human world. This project examines how contemporary travelogues foreground the bodily exposure of the traveller as a necessity to understanding landscapes that persist, transform, and flourish without human intervention. Moving beyond the human-centric conventions of travel writing, these narratives reconfigure vulnerability not as an individual fragility but as a mode of ecological relationality, in which the boundaries between the human and the nonhuman are shown to be mutually permeable, materially continuous, and ethically significant.

Focusing on Kathleen Jamie’s Surfacing and Cal Flyn’s Islands of Abandonment, the study analyses how the travelling body is narrated as a porous, relational entity whose corporeal and narrative authority is destabilised by ecological forces that exceed human scales of perception and control. Drawing on Stacy Alaimo’s concept of transcorporeality and Rosi Braidotti’s framework for posthuman subjectivity, this study argues that these travelogues reveal posthuman vulnerability as the very condition of possibility for ecological knowledge and ethical relation.

Through self-reflexive narration, observational uncertainty, and the abandonment of interpretive mastery, both travelogues negotiate the vulnerability of the traveller and the travellee. Jamie’s already-vulnerable body, marked by illness before her journey, encounters a landscape shaped simultaneously by ecological loss and the surfacing of hidden histories. Flyn’s self-effacing narrative voice, by contrast, encounters environments that recover in the wake of human withdrawal, exposing the traveller’s contingency rather than centrality. The structural mirroring of the traveller’s and the travellee’s vulnerabilities produces what the two texts together articulate as a posthuman subject constituted through ecological exposure.

Ultimately, this presentation contends that vulnerability in contemporary travel writing serves as a relational ground from which a more-than-human ethics of narration and coexistence becomes possible, contributing to an understanding of travel writing as a site of posthuman becoming.

Bio note:

Nihan Kadioglu is a PhD candidate in Anglophone Literature and Culture at the University of Göttingen, supervised by Prof. Dr. Barbara Schaff. Her current research focuses on posthuman travel writing, exploring changing concepts of travel and home through interspecies and ecological relationality. She holds an MA in English: Language, Literature, and Culture from the University of Göttingen, where she graduated with distinction. Her master's thesis examined feminist utopian ideals in the travel letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Mary Wollstonecraft. She earned her BA in English Language and Literature from Bilkent University, graduating cum laude. Her broader interests include feminist theory, ecocriticism, and transcultural studies.  

Travelling Out of Time: Antiquarian Vision, Vulnerable Embodiment, and Lovecraft's Quebeck

This paper examines H. P. Lovecraft’s long travelogue “A Description of the Town of Quebeck” as a neglected instance of embodied travel writing in which antiquarian vision becomes inseparable from vulnerability. Lovecraft’s Québec is widely and rightly approached through his nostalgia for pre-modern architecture, colonial survivals, and historical atmosphere, yet the text’s fascination with the past also registers a more unstable travel experience: the traveler is not simply observing old streets, churches, walls, and vistas, but being bodily displaced by them. Québec here appears as a place where travel unsettles ordinary temporal orientation, exposing the traveler to a form of historical vertigo in which the present loses authority and the body becomes the medium through which antiquarian desire is felt. Reading Lovecraft’s travel writing alongside the conference’s concern with vulnerability as a fundamental condition of mobility, I argue that “Quebeck” stages travel as an attempt to exit modern time that never fully succeeds. The traveler’s body remains perpetually implicated in fatigue, perceptual overload, spatial disorientation, and the affective intensity of encounter. At the same time, the text’s antiquarian gaze raises questions about narrative authority and cultural possession, as Québec becomes a desired historical object, but one whose material and colonial complexity troubles the fantasy of aesthetic mastery. Lovecraft’s travelogue therefore reveals antiquarianism as an embodied practice rather than merely an intellectual posture. To travel “out of time” is then not to transcend vulnerability, but to experience the body as the fragile medium through which historical longing, displacement, and exposure become narratable.

Bio note:

Christian Wilken is Research Associate in Modern English Literature at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf and Associate Editor of the International Journal of Disney Studies. He is the author of Reading Lovecraft in the Anthropocene: A New Dark Age (Routledge, 2025). His research focuses on Gothic literature and media, horror, postsecularity, hauntology, embodiment, worldhood, and transnational popular culture. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Cultural Politics, Textual Practice, Open Philosophy, Journal of Religion & Film, Journal of Popular Film and Television, Journal of Urban Cultural Studies, Animation Studies 2.0, American, British and Canadian Studies.

Bodies, Birds, and Boundaries: Travels of Mummified Remains

_{‘upon taking off these cerecloths, I found some of the larger feathers and all of the bones of the Ibis entire, the moment the air reached them they crumbled into dust’  - Isabella Romer, p.369}

In 1798, Napoleon’s Campaign in Egypt acted as a catalyst for a series of events that would lead to a mass obsession with ancient Egypt throughout the nineteenth century known as ‘Egyptomania’. Wealthy Western travellers would venture to Egypt and descend into mummy pits – the ‘Underland’- to procure a mummy (or part of one) for themselves. Many travellers wrote about their first-hand encounters with the mummified dead in their travel narratives. Analysing these texts offers a critical insight into how the mummified body was perceived whilst being exhumed.

This paper focuses on the intersection of travel writing and mummified remains whilst applying various concepts of the Gothic to understand how these encounters were embodied experiences. Moreover, in addition to mummified remains of humans, this research also analyses interactions between travellers and mummified birds. There is a significant gap in scholarship on the reception of mummified birds during this period; this paper not only sheds light on these cross-species interactions and neglected travel literature, but also how these encounters contribute to the concept of travel and the body. For example, Isabella Romer’s 1846 text describes the unwrapping of a sacred ibis which led to its ultimate destruction. This leads to the discussion of mummified remains (both human and bird) to be classed as vulnerable: as their bodies are destroyed or displaced, their spiritual travel to the Afterlife is interrupted, leading to consequences that museums are still dealing with to this day. Furthermore, this paper also contributes to current debates surrounding mummified remains transported and displayed in westernised museums. 

References:

Isabella Romer, A Pilgrimage to the Temples and Tombs of Egypt, Nubia, and Palestine, in 1845-6 (1846)

Bio note:

Lauren Bruce completed her PhD in 2025 which combined travel studies, history, literature, and Egyptology. Her thesis concentrated on the concept of ‘travel and the body’, focusing on how mummified remains were treated and perceived in the long nineteenth century. She is part of the Travelling Bodies research network which was funded by the DFG. She is the co-founder and co-chair of ISSE (The International Society for the Study of Egyptomania). Lauren’s project, Narratives of Mummified Remains, was launched in 2024, and undertakes research on a variety of topics surrounding the mummified body including the materiality of mummy brown paint, Rider Haggard, and museum ethics. Her research interests include the reception of Ancient Egypt, the materiality of mummy-brown paint, Hauntology, and the ethics of displaying mummified remains.