“Time Travel”

“Time travel” came to mind, when a student was considering research on “European women travelers in the Middle East during the nineteenth century” for the Orientalism and the Visual Art seminar.

This is how I imagined the journey:

1. Travel with women from the 19th century; look and see with our own eyes through their writings such as this one online:

Griswold, Louise M. Roope.: A woman’s pilgrimage to the Holy Land: or, Pleasant days abroad : being notes of a tour through Europe and the East. Hartford, Conn.: J.B. Burr & Hyde, 1871.

These reminiscences of a woman’s travels through Europe and Asia provide insight into life there.

Source: The Gerritsen Collection Women‘s History, 1543-1945.

2. Consult scholars on their methods in making sense of these travel writings with books at Tisch:

Rethinking Orientalism: Women, Travel, and the Ottoman Harem

Viewing the Islamic Orient: British Travel Writers of the Nineteenth Century

Women’s travel writing, 1750-1850

Great Women Travel Writers: From 1750 to the Present

Intimate outsiders: the Harem in Ottoman and Orientalist Art and Travel Literature

3. Travel even further back in time through these 17th and 18th  centuries  books:

Howell, James. Instructions and directions for forren travell … : with a new appendix for travelling into Turkey and the Levant parts. London, 1650. 156pp.

Shaw, Thomas. Travels, or Observations relating to several parts of Barbary and the Levant. 2nd ed., with great improvements …. London, 1757. 579pp.

Source: Making of the Modern World