Professor David Anderson lecturing in the Blue Mosque, Istanbul
Photo: Aysen Onem
The following essays are representative examples of essays produced for the course on “Travel Writing."
The explorations and subsequent publications of German biologist Alexander von Humboldt and French botanist Aimé Bonpland served as a template for the study trip of sixteen Hiram College undergraduates in winter, 2008. Bonpland and von Humboldt had set out on a South American expedition in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century that set the stage for Natural History as a scientific way to investigate and to understand the world around us. Their methodology of intense, close observation, measurement with scientific accuracy, and careful recording and publication of their findings became the model for The Biomes of the World Study Trip that began in Alaska in early January and ended eighty days later in Hamburg, Germany, by way of Hawaii, Thailand, India, the Maldives, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Turkey.
Bonpland and von Humboldt published their findings to the world in many different forms. They fed public interest in their undertaking for more than half a century with scientific articles, careful transcriptions of their field notes, correspondence, and personal observations. The sheer variety of their writings is evidence of their intense desire to fix the image (almost like early, experimental photography) of the biomes they were studying for their readers. In fact, their collective work formed the basis for understanding the close relationship of organisms to their environment, the foundation of the study of biomes.
Their work has also been the source for several studies of their accomplishments, as well as a remarkable novel by the Austrian writer Daniel Kehlmann, Measuring the World (Die Vermessung der Welt), published in 2005 and a bestseller in German-speaking Europe. This novel was the cornerstone of the interdisciplinary course taught during the trip. The characters in the novel, based roughly on their historic prototypes, deal with the intricacies of grasping and measuring the world that they confronted some two hundred years ago. At the same time, they are measuring both the scope of human accomplishment and the resiliency of human nature.
Unquestionably, by carefully and diligently recording their observations and measurements, both von Humboldt and Bonpland enormously expanded our understanding of the physical environment. The Hiram students who participated in this trip were also asked to expand their understanding of what it means to “write about experience.” In their three courses, they produced many genres of writing ranging from traditional scientific journaling to an experiment in collaborative blogging in response to novels and plays that they read in the interdisciplinary course. It is worth noting that of the sixteen students, fourteen are majoring in the sciences; one student is a management major and the other a sociology major. Hiram’s liberal arts tradition has served them all well, not only in the quality of their writing, but also in the breadth and depth of their interests.
Each student produced four essays over the twelve weeks of the trip, choosing, from a list of more than a dozen travel-writing genres, a specific approach for each essay. Students then chose from among those essays their favorite—or what they deemed their most successful—travel experiences to include here. The essays constitute other ways of measuring the world, different from their scientific journal writing or their synthesizing of literary approaches to the work of scientists.
David Anderson