e-Learning Support
Seminar: 10-M80-3-SpecMo-04 Women Explorers - Details

Seminar: 10-M80-3-SpecMo-04 Women Explorers - Details

Nachrichtenbox schließen
Sie sind nicht in Stud.IP angemeldet.

Allgemeine Informationen

Veranstaltungsname Seminar: 10-M80-3-SpecMo-04 Women Explorers
Untertitel
Veranstaltungsnummer 10-M80-3-SpecMo-04
Semester WiSe 2025/2026
Aktuelle Anzahl der Teilnehmenden 27
erwartete Teilnehmendenanzahl 30
Heimat-Einrichtung Anglistik/Amerikanistik
Veranstaltungstyp Seminar in der Kategorie Lehre
Nächster Termin Donnerstag, 11.12.2025 12:15 - 13:45, Ort: GW2 B1630
Art/Form Seminar
Englischsprachige Veranstaltung Ja

Räume und Zeiten

GW2 B1630
Donnerstag: 12:15 - 13:45, wöchentlich (14x)

Modulzuordnungen

  • Universität Bremen

Kommentar/Beschreibung

The history of exploration is also a history of the self-fashioning of the explorer subject and the explorer as author (Craciun 2011). As contemporary cultural products become invested in revising heroic, often aristocratic and predominantly male explorer myths, female narrators and characters are often championed as figures of empowerment. Historical fiction and film has discovered female expeditioners that combine knowledge-making and mobility as historical counterparts to masculinist explorer narratives. Such rewritings of the traditionally male domain of exploration are particularly worthwhile to examine as they “commemorate the contribution of women to the history of science” (Heilmann 2014: 109) but not without their own sets of problems.

Indeed, 'women explorers' have a long history as travellers and authors of travel writing. Despite the awareness of their own alterity in patriarchal societies, Euro-American female explorers travelling to Asia, Africa or Oceania were by no means automatically champions of anti-colonial sentiments or racial justice. In fact, their writings often reflect on processes of ‘othering’, as much as they display tensions, conflicts of loyalty, and discursive constraints (Bijon and Gacon 2009: 2). As women explorers faced difficulties in preparing, realising and writing up their travel, their accounts recognised “serendipity, chance and intuitive curiosity”, as well as “[f]ailures, strain and fear” and can be read as “fragments of critical interventions in the broad masculine historiography of expeditions and the epistemology of exploration” (Leshem and Pinkerton 2019: 503-4).

This seminar aims at familiarising students with the (gendered) history of colonial exploration and scientific expeditions, the historical depth and regional width of female travels, as much as the role of women explorers and their representations in constituting a seemingly universal women’s empowerment based on a specifically white feminist gaze. We will frame the discussion in this seminar with two short stories about Antarctic exploration, Ursula K Le Guin’s “Sur” (1982) and Pippa Goldschmidt’s “The First and the Last Expedition to Antarctica” (2024) with its ties to Bremerhaven. In between, our focus will be on texts by and about English explorer and naturalist Isabella Bird (1831-1904), English ethnographer Mary Henrietta Kingsley (1862-1900), and American cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead (1901-1978).

Please, buy and read the following texts:
- Caryl Churchill. Top Girls [1982]. Ed. Sophie Bush. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2018.
- Lily King. Euphoria. London: Picador, 2014.
- Sabina Murray, Tales of the New World. New York. Black Cat, 2011.

Anmeldemodus

Die Auswahl der Teilnehmenden wird nach der Eintragung manuell vorgenommen.

Nutzer/-innen, die sich für diese Veranstaltung eintragen möchten, erhalten nähere Hinweise und können sich dann noch gegen eine Teilnahme entscheiden.