Upcoming Conference "Exploring Bodies and Corporeality in Travel Writing"

The paper focuses on the significant missed rendez-vous between studies in travel writing and body studies. It argues that while travel writing is one of the most corporeal of literature genres, reliant on the representation of bodies in motion,  studies have not systematically considered the function of the body in the form. While travelling bodies have been read in gendered and racialized terms, or understood in terms of sexual orientation, this paper posits that normative assumptions around 'able-bodiedness' have often defined the parameters of the genre. Focusing on works from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it identifies an often-occluded corpus of travelogues by authors who challenge such normativity.
The paper analyses the ways in which texts that challenge any assertion of the non-disabled traveller as the unmarked case — by travellers with sensory impairments or limited mobility; by ill or ageing narrators — oblige us to rethink the sensory hierarchies and epistemological assumptions that regulate the traveller's relationship to the journey and to the world in which that journey occurs (and the ways in which these are turned into text).

Biographical Note:
Charles Forsdick is Drapers Professor of French at the University of Cambridge and Lead Fellow for Languages at the British Academy. He has published widely on travel writing, including the following monographs: Victor Segalen and the Aesthetics of Diversity: Journeys between Cultures (2000), Travel in Twentieth-Century French and Francophone Cultures: The Persistence of Diversity (2005), New Approaches to Twentieth-Century Travel Literature in French: History, Theory, Genre (2006) and Ella Maillart, “Oasis interdites” (2008). He has also co-edited a series of collections in the field: Travel Writing: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies (2012), Travel and Ethics: Theory and Practice (2013), Keywords for Travel Writing Studies (2019) and Microtravel: Confinement, Deceleration, Microspection (2024).

This talk examines how travel to Europe by upper-caste Malayali women in Kerala becomes a site of embodied negotiation, disruption, and self-redefinition. Drawing on travelogues such as Njaan Kanda Europe [The Europe I Saw] by Mrs. C. Kuttan Nair (1936) and London Diary by Gauriamma (1959), the study explores how the body, gendered, caste-marked and racialized, is central to these women’s experiences of mobility across colonial and postcolonial borders. It contends that corporeality, though not always explicitly articulated, permeates these narratives through emotional, sensory, and affective registers, shaping how women engage with unfamiliar cultural, spatial, and social contexts.
Situated within a transitional historical moment between colonial and postcolonial regimes, these travelogues reveal how mobility for women was both enabled and constrained by dominant discourses of domesticity, propriety, and nationalist femininity. The traveling female body, marked by intersecting structures of gender, class, and caste, emerges as a site where anxieties surrounding movement, identity, and belonging are registered. Through narrative strategies that foreground physical unease, adaptation, cultural dissonance, and emotional ambivalence, these writings articulate a gendered geography of travel that complicates dominant masculine models of exploration and authorship.
By foregrounding the narrative staging of embodied discomfort and cultural negotiation, these texts not only challenge masculinist conventions of travel writing but also reveal how gendered corporeality is discursively constructed through genre, affect, and vernacular expression. By attending to the subtle manifestations of corporeality, through tropes of fatigue, longing, sensory encounter, and spatial negotiation, the paper argues that travel writing by Malayali women offers a critical intervention into how the female body mediates cross-cultural experience. These texts do not merely record journeys, they perform embodied reflections on mobility, subjectivity, and cultural encounter. In doing so, they reframe Europe not as a singular modern ideal but as a shifting, contested space encountered through specific, situated bodies. This paper thus contributes to broader discussions on the role of embodiment in travel writing and the gendered production of knowledge through movement.

Biographical Note:
Jeevan Perakathu is a PhD scholar in the Department of History at the University of Hyderabad, India. She completed her postgraduate studies at the same institution and her undergraduate degree at Lady Shri Ram College for Women, University of Delhi. Her research focuses on twentieth century travelogues by Malayali women, examining how travel serves as a site of embodied negotiation, affective engagement, and vernacular knowledge production. Her research interests include transnational mobility, gendered spatiality, decolonial thought and identity formations, histories of affect and emotions, feminist historiography, and cultural memory in South Asia.

This talk sets out to examine the female body in William Dalrymple’s Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India (2009), a travel text based on the biographies of nine persons Dalrymple encounters during his travels through India, all of whom seem to be on the periphery of Indian society yet have extraordinary stories to share with the author. As Dalrymple meets these persons who soon act as travellees, their bodies appear to be tied not solely to class and caste, but as vassals of resistance and resilience in India, torn between tradition and modernity. Indeed, the bodies of all these unforgettable characters are an epitome of (precarious) life they have chosen or has been imposed on them.
My contention is that Nine Lives is not a mere work of travel writing in which the traveller’s body and vision take centre stage, but a distinct portrayal of subaltern women in motion whose patterns of road travel provide a new insight not only into the role of pilgrimage, social mobility, and cultural dynamics, but also the significance of body in a non-Western context – body that is in bondage by virtue of social, economic, and gender constraints.
To this end, I will analyse the story of two dramatically different women whom Dalrymple interviews and travels with: the Jain nun called Mataji and a devadasi or a temple dancer-cum-prostitute called Rani Bai, both of whom travel but for different reasons. Whereas Mataji walks several miles a day to seek inner peace, Rani Bai travels long distance to pay tribute to the goddess of Yellahmma as her ‘spiritual daughter’. If Mataji is holy for Jain devotees for abandoning the world, Rani is scared for the Brahmins as someone dedicated to the goddess. While Mataji is dying after embracing Sallekhana (the ritual fast to death) to achieve Nirvana in Jainism (one of the oldest religions in India), Rani as a Dalit woman is dying of HIV due to years of being a sex worker to feed her family, whose two teenage daughters have already died of AIDS as devadasis.
By investigating these women on the move, I seek to demonstrate how Dalrymple is far from exoticizing the female body or Othering the body through imperial eyes, rather he is keen to show how writing travel in relation to (wasted and withering) corporality offers a novel perspective on gendered mobilities in a postcolonial context.

Biographical Note:
Nadia Butt is Professor of Global Anglophone Literatures and Cultures at the University of Frankfurt. She is the author of Transcultural Memory and Globalised Modernity in Contemporary Indo-English Novels (2015). She has taught postcolonial literatures at the Universities of Giessen, the University of Muenster, the University of Colombo, and the University of Milwaukee-Wisconsin. Her main areas of research are travel writing and theory, transcultural theory and literature, postcolonial literatures, mobility and migration studies, and memory studies. Her research has appeared in international peer-reviewed journals such as Prose Studies, Journal of Aesthetics and Culture, Postcolonial Interventions, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, and Studies in Travel Writing. Recently, she has published a handbook on The Anglophone Novel in the 21st Century: Cultural Contexts – Literary Developments (2023). Currently, she is editing her second monograph The Travelling Imagination in Cross-Cultural Literature.

This talk critically examines the intersections of corporeality, marginality, and mobility within contemporary travel writing, with a specific focus on queer, transgender, and racialised bodies. It emphasises the Indian context, wherein transgender individuals frequently engage in travel not for leisure but driven by socio-economic necessity, such as participation in sex work, gender-affirmation surgeries, or essential healthcare services. These journeys, often undocumented and involuntary, highlight the profound impacts of systemic marginalisation, illuminating the embodied and politically charged dimensions of mobility.
Through a detailed textual analysis of memoirs, digital travelogues, and creative nonfiction by contemporary queer and trans writers—including Alok Vaid-Menon, Bani Amor, and selected Indian queer anthologies—this paper positions travel narratives as potent mediums for critiquing and resisting constraints imposed upon marginalised bodies. Such narratives explicitly challenge traditional, colonial, and heteronormative travel literature by foregrounding corporeal experiences marked by pain, performativity, and political defiance.
The analysis engages an intersectional theoretical framework, incorporating Jasbir Puar’s theory of assemblage, which highlights the interconnectedness of bodily vulnerabilities and geopolitical conditions; Alison Kafer’s conceptualisation of “crip futurity,” emphasising disability’s relationship with temporal experiences of mobility; and Gayatri Gopinath’s queer diasporic aesthetics, which foregrounds the intersections of sexuality, race, and migration. The paper further situates these discourses within broader debates surrounding caste, class, and disability in South Asia, underlining how class privileges shape differential access to mobility and safety. In contrast, economically marginalised individuals often experience travel through lenses of precarity, violence, and resilience. Ultimately, this paper advocates a critical re-examination of travel literature to include narratives that expose structural inequities and recognise travel not merely as romantic exploration, but as lived experiences of exclusion, survival, and self-definition.

References:

• Kafer, Alison. Feminist, Queer, Crip. Indiana University Press, 2013.
• Puar, Jasbir K. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Duke University Press, 2007.
• Vaid-Menon, Alok. Beyond the Gender Binary. Penguin Random House, 2020
• Amor, Bani, ed. Gender and Mobility: Travel Writing and Intersectionality. Routledge, 2022.
• Gopinath, Gayatri. Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures. Duke University Press, 2005.

In the interwar years, a number of European writers worried about the quality and authenticity of their embodied experiences abroad. This presentation seeks to map and analyze, within European travel writing, a desire for a sensory immediacy that could counter those fears. Surveying exemplary texts in English, German, and Dutch by D.H. Lawrence, Annemarie Schwarzenbach, and A. den Doolaard, it argues that a direct, multisensorial, and therefore supposedly revitalizing encounter with the environment was a common ideal among a strand of interwar travel writers.
In the first part of this presentation, I trace how in their travel practice, these practitioners strove to eliminate any ‘intermediaries’ that stood between their bodies and the foreign environment, and that might therefore compromise an ‘immediate’ perception of it. This ‘disintermediation’ took several forms: from bypassing the middlemen of tourism, (print and audiovisual) media technologies, and vehicles of speed, to unlearning inherited ways of seeing abroad, such as the picturesque. Not sight – often considered the most privileged sense in modern Western travel writing – but touch emerges in these modernist-inflected texts as the most uncorrupted, trustworthy, and valued sense.
The second part of the presentation focuses on the representational strategies used by Lawrence, Schwarzenbach, and Den Doolaard to render sensory immediacy in their writing. Their travel accounts often resort to the use of the present tense, direct discourse, timekeeping, and a semblance of minimal narrative construction, building on features of the diary form and the journalistic reportage. Yet at the limit, these texts run up against the inevitable mediation of the written word in representing corporeal experience: language itself then poses a problem in the pursuit of immediacy.

Biographical Note:
Florian Deroo is a literary scholar and historian connected to the Centre for Literary and Intermedial Crossings at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and the History Department of Ghent University. His main areas of research are interwar culture, travel writing, and the history and theory of multisensory aesthetics. In June 2025, he defended a doctoral dissertation titled After the Senses, which explored the perception of landscapes in European travel writing in the 1930s. He has also researched social reform movements and has written on film. Barge Life, a book-length essay on the 1934 French classic L’Atalante, is forthcoming in July 2025.

American journalist Paul Salopek’s Out of Eden Walk, an ongoing global journey retracing paths of early human migration, offers a compelling case of travel writing that foregrounds the body as both medium and message. This paper explores how Salopek’s method of slow, non-mechanised travel stages the walking body as a site of vulnerability, perception and resistance. In contrast to speed and abstraction of contemporary mobility, his approach reasserts the fragility and resilience of the human body as a storytelling instrument (Maruo-Schröder et al).
Spanning deserts, megacities, war zones, and rural hinterlands, Salopek’s journey engages directly with the physical, sensory and affective dimensions of movement. His writing weaves together slow journalism, historical consciousness, and reflective attention to the embodied act of walking: “Walking is falling forward. Each step we take is an arrested plunge, a collapse averted, a disaster braked. In this way, to walk becomes an act of faith” (Salopek 2016). The embodied experiences, such as exhaustion, hunger, injury and encounter, become the central motifs through which he reveals the uneven geographies of access, risk, and movement into focus.
The paper argues that this embodied narrative method unsettles genre convention in travel writing and foreground an ethics of presence and slowness (Gros). Salopek’s walk becomes an act of resistance against journalistic acceleration, digital detachment, and mechanised travel. Moving at a human pace of five kilometres per hours, he creates space for encounters, stories and empathy.
Finally, the paper positions Salopek’s walking body in dialogue with displaced and precarious figures he encounters, raising questions about who gets to move, under what conditions, and at what cost. Out of Eden Walk restores scale and intimacy to travel writing and reclaims walking as a way of “thinking through movement” (Ingold).

Biographical Note:
Sunil Choudhary is working as an Assistant Professor of German Studies at Amity University Jaipur, Rajasthan. He holds an MA and PhD at the Centre for German Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. His doctoral research was an interdisciplinary cultural study on Crowds and Collective Behaviour in 1920s Europe, with a particular focus on Germany and Austria. He has been awarded several scholarships and research grants from Indian, German and Austrian funding agencies and has undertaken research visits to both Germany and Austria. His research interests include German literature and culture, crowd theory, memory studies, European studies and postcolonial theory.

In the twenty-first century, travel writing is increasingly decentring the human subject by foregrounding ecological entanglements and embodied encounters with the more-than-human world. This project examines how contemporary travelogues reconceptualise the travelling body, not as an isolated or superior subject, but as an interconnected and responsive entity shaped by interactions with environments, nonhuman agents, and planetary forces. Moving beyond traditional anthropocentric and Western-centric modes, these narratives foreground corporeality not only as physical experience but also as a site of relational perception and ethical transformation.
Focusing on The Nutmeg’s Curse by Amitav Ghosh, Underland by Robert Macfarlane, and Islands of Abandonment by Cal Flyn, this presentation explores how each travelogue textualises embodied experience in the context of the Anthropocene. These works challenge the figure of the detached traveller by highlighting vulnerability, ethical perception, and affective attunement to landscape, environmental change and nonhuman life. They foreground what Rosi Braidotti terms “a post-anthropocentric shift towards a planetary, geo-centered perspective,” while engaging with broader posthumanist discourses (Braidotti 81).
Through close textual analysis, the presentation examines how these travelogues narrate encounters with the more-than-human world by granting agency to ecological others, rejecting binary oppositions between the body and the world, and framing mobility as both an ethical and embodied practice. Ultimately, this project argues that posthuman travel writing reframes corporeality not as a fixed essence but as a becoming-with, contributing to an ethics of interspecies solidarity.

References:
Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. Polity Press, 2013.

Biographical 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. 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.  

My starting point is the observation that when it comes to the human body in travel writing, colonial travel writing tends to focus on the bodies of the inhabitants of the visited regions – on their racialized bodily appearance and physiognomy, their physical inferiority or superiority, their strength and appeal, their sexuality, eating habits, etc. – while the corporeality of the travelers, the explorers, scientists, and conquerors often remains discreetly in the dark. This imbalance in attention is perhaps even more evident in the research on the texts. Therefore, I would like to take this CfP as an opportunity to reverse the perspective: the subject of investigation is the precarious corporeality of the explorers, specifically the precarious nutritional situation aboard James Cookʼs “Resolution” during his second circumnavigation (1772–1775) as narrated by Georg Forster, who traveled with him.
Regarding the exposing of the (male, white) explorerʼs bodily vulnerability, Forsterʼs A Voyage Round the World (1777) is still a remarkable text. The nutritional situation on the “Resolution“, characterized by careful planning, but also scarcity and monotony, constitutes itself in constant interaction with the imaginings of South Pacific foodscapes and their unfamiliar alimentary systems. Despite detailed records of provisions – livestock, barrels upon barrels of water, biscuit, salted meat, and the famous sauerkraut to prevent scurvy – the narrative reveals the journey as a physical ordeal marked by malnutrition, sickness, and even the threat of starvation. “[T]he hour of dinner was hateful to us, for the well known smell of the victuals had no sooner reached our nose, than we found it impossible to partake of them with a hearty appetite” (541).
I will analyze some of the important scenes in the travelogue where these nutritional crises come to the fore, including the disgust with rotten meat and moldy biscuit (contrasted with the fresh fish provided by the New Zealanders), the scene of Cook and his crew eyewitnessing and therefore “proving” an act of Indigenous cannibalism aboard the “Resolution” (the presumed cannibalism of the “Other” is not only a crystallization point of colonial discourse and a deeply corporeal figure but also a liminal figure that unsettles bodily boundaries), and the episode where Georg Forster tells the story about his attempts to cure a sick Captain Cook with dog soup. My aim is to explore how Forsterʼs text foregrounds the explorersʼ bodily fragility in the alimentary exceptional situation that is traveling aboard an exploration ship.

Biographical Note:
Jasmin Köhler is Research Associate (Postdoc) at the Institute for Art and Cultural Studies, Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena, and member of the Cluster of Excellence “Imaginamics. Practices and Dynamics of Social Imagining”. She holds an BA in Sociology, Gender Studies, and German Literature, an MA in German Literature, and an PhD in Modern German Literature from Humboldt University of Berlin with a project on the Figure of Cannibalism in German Literature around 1920, graduating summa cum laude in 2024. In 2019/20 she was Visiting Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, and in 2023/24 Research Associate in the department “Modern German Literature from the 18th Century to the Present / Theories and Methods of Literary Gender Studies” at the Institute for German Literature at Humboldt University of Berlin.

This talk examines how Charles Dickens’s 1842 US journey, as recorded in American Notes for General Circulation, develops a corporeal ethics that later resurfaces in A Christmas Carol. Dickens’s travelogue registers the body as a moral sensorium: seasick passages on steamboats, the omnipresent spit of public life, illness, claustrophobia, and visceral outrage at slavery.
I argue that these embodied shocks do more than color reportage, as they structure Dickens’s ethical imagination by turning fatigue, disgust, and vulnerability into diagnostic tools for reading social systems. The talk shows how American Notes stages the author himself as a “traveling body” whose sensory exposure mediates judgment, and how this experiential matrix is transposed into the fiction of A Christmas Carol, where hunger, warmth, illness, and care famously become vehicles of critique and reform. Situating American Notes within debates on corporeality in travel writing, the paper recovers Dickens as a writer for whom travel is ethically transformative because it is first physically endured.

Biographical Note:
Christian Wilken teaches Modern English Literature at Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf and is a session lecturer at the University of Koblenz. He is a member of the DFG-funded network “Traveling Bodies” and the Hauntology & Spectrality Research Network at York St. John. His work spans ecocriticism, psychoanalysis, and media theory; current projects include first contact in speculative fiction and a study of late Dickens. His monograph Reading Lovecraft in the Anthropocene was published with Routledge in early 2025.

The beginning of the nineteenth century marks a significant shift in how northern and central Europe perceived Spain. Political, cultural, and historical transformations at the turn of the century, along with the rise of Romanticism, turned the Iberian Peninsula into an appealing destination for many travellers from England, France and Germany. From that moment onwards, Spain was widely regarded as a dreamland rich in exoticism and medieval charm. This newfound fascination gave rise to stereotypes and generalizations that framed the land and its people as fundamentally “Others”, a perception that would persist throughout much of the century and well into the 1900s. These constructions of alterity were frequently reinforced through descriptions of bodily features and often elicited visceral reactions in the traveller’s own body ranging from fascination and empathy to disgust and discomfort.
This paper explores how Spain was constructed as a cultural “Other” in two German travel accounts by female authors: Ida Hahn-Hahn’s Reisebriefe (1841) and Clara Biller’s Briefe aus Paris und Spanien. 1864–1870 (1901). While Hahn-Hahn frames the land from an aristocratic female gaze and draws on aestheticised, Orientalist tropes to articulate cultural difference, Biller’s letters shed light on the challenges faced by a middle-class woman travelling alone and supporting herself in 1870s Spain. Despite the differences in their experiences, both accounts construct alterity through detailed depictions of Spanish “Other” bodies, appearances, and physical presence. In doing so, corporeality reveals itself as a tool to reinforce inherited stereotypes and convey cultural difference. This study asks whether, despite significant differences in class, context, and historical moment, gender alone might produce shared patterns in the perception and representation of the cultural “Other”.

Biographical Note:
Ingrid García Wistädt is Associate Professor of German Philology in the Department of English and German at the University of València. She has participated in numerous research projects and is a member of the permanent research group RIALE (https://www.uv.es/riale) (GIUV2013-078), whose main activity is to lay the foundations for a comprehensive investigation of intercultural relations between Spain and German-speaking countries from the Middle Ages to the present day. Her main fields of research, in addition to those related to the subject of her doctoral thesis (From the Minnesänger to the Romantic artist. Ludwig Tieck’s Romanticism through the figure of the musician and his literary configuration), are precisely in the field of intercultural relations between Germany and Spain, especially the literature of German travellers in Spain in the 19th century. She teaches German literature from its origins up to the 19th century. She has also been involved in many management tasks, as well as being a member of the University Senate and the Faculty Board. Since 2019 she is Director of the Master's Degree in Research in Languages and Literatures.

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). Between 2019 and 2022 she was a funded PhD candidate at the Department of English and German at 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.

“More than a writer, I was nothing but a lump of weary flesh.”

Despite being a prolific author who addressed a wide range of contemporary issues such as ageing and care work, environmental pollution, and racial discrimination, Ariyoshi Sawako (1931–1984) is primarily known for her historical novels and remains largely overlooked outside of Japan. In 1968, Ariyoshi travelled to New Guinea at the invitation of a longtime friend, anthropologist Hatanaka Sachiko, who was conducting fieldwork in the rainforest area.
Her travelogue Onna futari no Nyūginia (Two Women in New Guinea, 1969) recounts her stay, originally planned for one week but extended to three, and her interactions with the local ethnic group known as the Sisimin. While maintaining a light tone, Ariyoshi’s narrative focuses on the relationship between the writer and her friend, contrasting Hatanaka’s composed and pragmatic attitude with her own struggle to cope with the extreme conditions. At the same time, she conveys certain cultural features of the Sisimin, filtered through her physical and emotional reactions to the environment.
In this work, the body becomes a site to express both her lived experience and her encounter with the ethnic Other. Her own body, damaged and transformed over the course of her stay, becomes the primary medium through which the reader perceives her life in the inhospitable rainforest. The otherness of the Sisimin, in turn, is revealed through their corporeality: their naked bodies, their scent, and their bodily modifications.
In this paper, I examine the various strategies through which Ariyoshi deploys the body as the backbone of her travelogue, highlighting the close relationship between corporeality and travel writing, and drawing attention to a text too often overlooked as a minor work by a neglected author.

Biographical Note:
Stefano Romagnoli is Associate Professor of Japanese Language and Literature at Sapienza University of Rome. His research focuses on travel writing, representations of identity and otherness in war literature, and questions of memory and responsibility in early postwar Japanese fiction.

Pilgrimage in Europe has been booming for several decades, with the Way of St James to Santiago de Compostela being among the best known. The current pilgrimage movement — as a special form of travelling or spiritual tourism — is unthinkable without the pilgrim’s body. Regardless of why and how pilgrims travel, whether on foot, by bicycle, or in a wheelchair, physicality and corporeality are central aspects of a pilgrimage. Nowadays, pilgrimage is highly present in the media in literature, blogs, and films but mostly without topics such as disability or disease. Modern pilgrimage is researched from numerous perspectives (for example, theologically, sociologically and in tourism studies; for an overview of research, see Lienau 2018; on the physicality of pilgrimage, see Terreault 2019, Grabe 2006, Lienau 2012, Haab 2000 and Schneider 2013).
In pilgrimage contexts, it is often said that pilgrimage is ‘praying with feet’; the body is not only a medium and carrier of experiences, but the physical and performative act of ‘doing pilgrimage’ can be meaningful and linked to identification processes during pilgrimages. Regarding pilgrimage as an embodied practice, Lienau (2018) makes a distinction here between “Körper” (body: which you have) and “Leiblichkeit” (body: which you are). Terreault (2019) emphasises that body and mind belong together on a pilgrimage by referring to the “mindbody”. The physical movement towards a sacred destination and experiences such as euphoria, fatigue, pain, and physical transformations during long-distance pilgrimages go hand in hand with spiritual wholeness and community experiences.
The article analyses German language self-experience reports by pilgrims for whom the pilgrimage on the Way of St James was a particular challenge due to physical functional impairments [paraplegia (Bernhard 2007, 2010) and blindness (Olschevski/Lehmann 2011)]. The goal is to elaborate on the interplay of spiritual and physical transformations and to show how disabled pilgrims reflect upon their bodies in their own narrations.

The proposed talk argues that the subfield of graphic travel writing is a particularly fruitful space in which to explore the centrality of embodiment in travel literature. Recent comics studies scholarship (e.g. Jared Gardner, Hillary Chute, Ian Hague, Elisabeth El Refaie and Ester Szép) has drawn attention to the ways that comics are a deeply embodied medium, where the indexical connection of the artist’s body—the trace of the drawing hand on the page—is not replaced by typography. Moreover, the very act of self-portraiture across multiple panels and pages provides cartoonists with extended opportunities to engage with the body, embodied perception, and the sociocultural assumptions and values that render bodies meaningful. Hague and Szép have also advanced theories that explore how the haptically-charged and graphiated surfaces of the comics page affect the embodied responses of readers.
The paper draws on representative examples from a wide range of contemporary graphic travelogues (e.g., Ulli Lust, Eleanor Davis, Miriam Katin, Whit Taylor and Oliver East) to explore the special affordances of comics to foreground the body as both a sensing and sensemaking apparatus. I particularly consider how artists render experiences of vulnerability— whether due to the physical exertion of travel, the sensory or emotional shock of dislocation, or when confronting the attitudes of people who regard the traveler as objectified other on the basis of race or gender—and the compositional strategies that invite readers to “travel along” with the artists’ avatars. The paper argues that while comics may at first seem a medium that inevitably reinforces the ocularcentric nature of much travel writing, their materiality, multimodal construction, and freedom from the requirements of realism offer tools to foreground other senses and interrogate the dominance of sight as a locus of knowledge and power. While the focus on the travelling body may on the one hand offer a sense of “authenticity” and eye-witness account, the self-consciously mediated nature of graphic travelogues simultaneously exposes their status as subjective representation rather than objective description.

Biographical Note:
Christina Kraenzle is Associate Professor of German at York University, Toronto, Canada. Her teaching and research focus on modern and contemporary German-language cultural studies, cinema, comics studies, and travel writing. Recent publications include articles and review essays in The German Quarterly, The Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, Seminar, and book chapters in the edited volumes German Graphic Narratives and Trauma (2025) and Anxious Journeys: Contemporary German Travel Literature (2019). Along with Julia Ludewig she co-edited a special issue on Transnationalism in German Comics in the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics (2020). She is also the co-editor (with Maria Mayr) of The Changing Place of Europe in Global Memory Cultures (2017) and the journal Seminar.