Where are we? Maps, Travel, and Wonder

Feeling lost? This course links two key forms that shape the spaces we dwell in, cross through, and imagine: medieval maps and travel narratives. Though these constructions are head-shaking artifacts to behold, each episteme also indexes familiar categories of imaginative geography like excluded difference, included identity, and fantasies of power and control. We will query what these forms make: cultural diffusion and exchange, phenomena of wonder and curiosity, collaborations of word and image, and tales of travel, a genre that is definitionally transgressive.