Regional Faculty & Cultural Mellon Research Fellows
2006–2007

Project
Paths of Desire: Importation of American Luxury Goods into Europe during the Early Modern Period

Edmund Campos
Assistant Professor, English, Swarthmore College

In a recently completed manuscript on Renaissance privateering (Pirates in the Paper Sea), Prof. Campos demonstrates how maritime piracy reconfigures traditional notions of literary property across international lines in the context of imperial competition. Arguing that literary relations between England and Spain are modeled on the state-sponsored policy of English piracy in Spanish-American waters, he shows how this practice of plunder gave rise to a discursive framework of international theft within which English translators worked to “steal” Spanish texts and culture. In Paths of Desire, Prof. Campos will focus on European travel sites of New World production, not merely marking the appearance of luxury commodities on the European market, but following European travelers to the source to show how discourses surrounding the use of products in their native environments script their entrance into Europe. While his work will rely heavily on texts produced on both sides of the Atlantic, such as European dietary guides, herbals or New World natural histories, that reliance on transatlantic travel narratives will help to show how commodities signify at great distance along chains of economic desire. Products to be studied are gold, tobacco, cocoa, and Mexican chocolate.


Project
Beyond the Nation: Travel and Exile Networks in Napoleonic Europe

Ann Gardiner
Assistant Professor, Literature, Philadelphia University

Château de Coppet on Lake Geneva, the renowned family estate of Germaine de Staël (1766–1817), served as a gathering place for traveling and exiled intellectuals at the revolutionary turn of the 19th century in Napoleonic Europe. Although de Stael grew up in the Enlightenment salons of Paris, her outspoken views on politics, literature, and women’s rights provoked Napoleon to ban her from the French capital in 1802. She then lived at Coppet, traveling extensively until her death. In this study of the convergence of travel, exile networks, and cosmopolitanism in Napoleonic Europe (1802–1815), Prof. Gardiner has identified over 300 other exiled and often traveling intellectuals from many European countries and the Atlantic world who visited de Staël’s meetinghouse during this period. Because travelers in Europe had virtually to pass through Coppet to get anywhere else, de Staël’s estate became a literal intellectual “way station,” a cross-cultural laboratory of ideas in which the vicissitudes of Imperial travel played a significant role—and, as Prof. Gardiner will show, a singular example of an alternative public sphere in the age of the first French Empire.


Project
Amerique le miroir: Tocqueville, Beauvoir, and What Outside Observers Reveal about American Democracy

Keally McBride
Senior Fellow, Political Science, University of Pennsylvania

Even the most unwavering self examination fails to provide the view that handing the mirror to someone else can. Today, Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America is widely considered the best source for students of American politics and society. It is also highly revealing about French politics and society during the turbulent 1830s. As a product of this old world, Tocqueville’s commitment to overturning the ancien regime was to make his personage obsolete. Simeone de Beauvoir’s journey to America had a similar task of unmaking and remaking her self. In 1947, the year suffrage was awarded to the women of France, Beauvoir set off to the United States to study and compare the lives of women in the two countries. During her journey she developed the thesis for The Second Sex. On returning to France, she dropped her original idea of comparing the lives of women in France and the U.S. and instead published her travel journal, America, Day by Day and wrote The Second Sex. Dr. McBride will examine how these two figures that embody the development of new democratic eras demonstrate the importance of travel as an unheralded aspect of democratic development and theory—and what they reveal about American democratic temperaments and practices.


Project
Vietnam, Infertility, and the Globalized Market for Medical Tourism

Melissa Pashigian
Assistant Professor, Anthropology, Bryn Mawr College

The relation of travel to medical care has endured over centuries as people have sacrificed much in search of panaceas and elixirs. Ponce de Leon’s search for the Fountain of Youth and pilgrimages to the healing waters at Lourdes are two notable historical examples. Today, a particularly striking movement is the ‘fertility tourist’ industry which has taken hold in Vietnam. In 1997, in-vitro fertilization (IVF) first became available in Vietnam through a transfer of technology and training from France. Since then, Vietnamese reproductive specialists have rapidly perfected their techniques and become so successful in producing pregnancies through IVF as to eclipse other more established IVF countries, such as China, which competes for the same revenues from the emerging market of medical tourism. Dr. Pashigian will show how these forms of globalized reproductive travel upset existing hierarchies of knowledge and power between countries. How are people, cultures, and things remade as IVF travels and as people travel for these services?


Project
The “Well-Travel’d” Story of the Duchess Mazarin: A Case Study in Early Modern Border Crossing

Susan Shifrin
Assistant Professor, Art History, Associate Director, Education, Berman Museum of Art, Ursinus College

In 1666 at the age of 20, Hortense Mancini, Duchess of Mazarin, abandoned her husband and her family home after five years of marriage. Considered a great adventuress and femme fatale, she became infamous throughout Europe for many things, notably her skill with swords and pistols, her penchant for dressing in men’s clothing, and her affair with Charles II. Using the literal, geographical “border crossings” of the Duchess Mazarin as a synecdoche for her various transgressions of boundaries of all kinds, Dr. Shifrin will explore the ways in which this woman (and by extension, a number of her contemporaries) crossed geographical, gendered, and socio-cultural boundaries.


Project
Travel and Travail: The Vagrant in Nineteenth-Century British Literature and Culture

Kate Thomas
Professor, English, Bryn Mawr College

Nineteenth-century England is generally known as a glory age of travel. Exploration became tourism, and travel became a norm for the middle classes up. How was England to contend, then, with the inverse face of travel: the tramp? In researching the literary and cultural representations of this group which caused England muc national dismay rather than glory, Dr. Thomas will show how the tramp was repeatedly portrayed as perverse. In late 19th-century British law, the traveling poor were not afforded the status of a private life and were legally designated as fully public subjects. The only other group defined as subject to the law “whether in private or in public” were homosexuals. Why and how were the vagrant and the sexual deviant conflated through delineation of their public mobility?


Project
John Constable, Locks, and Travel on the River Stour

Jennifer Thompson
Assistant Curator, European Painting before 1900, Philadelphia Museum of Art

John Constable (1776–1837) depicted locks in over 60 paintings and drawings throughout his career. Before the advent of the railroad, locks, sluices, and the navigable, or un-navigable, state of the waterways were critical to anyone living or working alongside them. Deliberately calling attention to the importance to local commerce of maintaining and improving the lock system on the river Stour, Constable gave titles such as “Scene on a Navigable River” to landscapes depicting well-known towns in Suffolk. The range and development of Constable’s interest in the lock as a subject, which has not previously been addressed, is the subject of Thompson’s research. Her work will be important in preparing for an exhibition and catalogue on John Constable at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2008.


Project
Finding Others Within: Travel, British Romanticism, and Religious Difference

Michael Tomko
Assistant Professor, Literature, Villanova University

A reconsideration of travel has recently enriched, enlivened, and expanded the geographical scope of British romantic literature and culture. The emerging map of romanticism is transatlantic, and cosmopolitan. In this book project, Prof. Tomko extends and redirects this critical trend, examining how romantic period writers journeyed within Britain to sites redolent with wounds and memories of regional and religious conflict. Drawing on various accounts of the role of religion in nation formation, he will argue that romantic journeys to ruined abbeys, holy wells, and deconsecrated churches in England and Ireland not only revealed a deeply fractured sense of national history that troubled the British entry into modernity but also became what Edward Said has called a “traveling theory” that framed an approach to “savages” encountered in the imperial project as comparable to pre-modern, “Dark Age” Catholics.


Project
Rimbaud’s Voyages: Real and Imagined

Seth Whidden
Assistant Professor, French, Villanova University

The poetic, imagined voyages that underpin much of Rimbaud’s poetry, and the real, lived voyages that marked his life after he left poetry and Europe are deeply influenced by changing notions of time and space throughout the 19th century. Drawing on the work of others on the influence of technological advancements in 19th-century French fiction and the implications for travel at the beginning of the modern era is clear: speeding up transportation allows for travel and communication at greater distances, making the world smaller and adding realism to the fictional narratives of the faraway. Dr. Whidden will extend this discussion to poetry, where little work has been done on the intersections between the Orient, that great imagined locus of travel, and technology’s irrevocable changes on the French landscape. Specifically, how did the changing face of spatial relations in Rimbaud’s world play out in thematic and formal aspects of his poetry?