Scientific Travel Writing and the Environmental Imagination by Isabella Engberg

In this episode, hosts Ian Grosz and Lise Olsen interview Isabella Maria Engberg about her PhD project, which discusses how environmental portrayals in scientific travel writing from the long nineteenth century have been developed. It considers works by three scientific authors who have benefited greatly from what they have seen, gathered, and understood from their travels and have, with their scientific and literary output, contributed greatly towards humanity’s understanding of ecology. These authors and their travel narratives include Alexander von Humboldt’s Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent, During the Years 1799-1804 (1814-29), Charles Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle (second edition, 1845), and Ernst Haeckel’s Indische Reisebriefe (English: A Visit to Ceylon, 1883). The project investigates how journey narratives, written at different times and in different contexts, portray the interrelatedness of humans, organisms, and the rest of the material world. It seeks to get to grip with the transnational networks of knowledge between these travelling naturalists, the tensions between the “exciting” drama of encounter and the “dry” description of natural phenomena as well as the distinctly literary imagination necessary to conceive ecology.

Bio
Isabella Maria Engberg is currently undertaking a PhD programme in Comparative Literature. She also studied her undergraduate degree, MA (Hons) English-German, at the University of Aberdeen. During these years, she enjoyed both internships and an exchange year in Germany. Her academic interests are the environmental humanities, nineteenth century culture, and the relationship between science and literature. She is currently on an archival stay from April until August 2022 at the University of Jena, Germany, where she works with materials in the previous private residence of Ernst Haeckel, “Villa Medusa”. These are relevant to investigate how Haeckel’s diary and field notes turned into his published travel narrative. Isabella is supervised by Dr Helena Ifill, Dr Tara Beaney, and Prof Catherine Jones.