On Thursday 5 March, Prof. Dr. Natalya Din-Kariuki (University of Warwick) will give a lecture reflecting on some of the key conceptual and methodological challenges raised by the study of travel writing, a capacious body of material comprising diaries, journals, letters, logbooks, and reports. Its central argument is that while the entanglements of travel and colonialism are well known, insufficient attention has been paid to the role played by the rhetoric of travel writing in articulating and reinforcing colonial discourse, and thus the practice of colonialism itself. Focussing on early modern English travel writers including the proto-tourist Thomas Coryate, the diplomat and poetic theorist William Scott, the chaplain Edward Terry, and the merchant Peter Mundy, this lecture sets out a model for reading travel writing which attends equally to questions of politics and poetics. It places particular attention to the relationship between the language and ideas of the rhetorical tradition — which encouraged orators to speak for ‘profit’, to gain ‘credit’, and to ‘prove’ themselves to their listeners – and the economics of early modern travel and trade, which were preoccupied with profit, credit, and improvement, too. Moreover, it reflects on the implications of this research for meritocracy studies by considering the fraught relationship between ideas of meritocracy and the practice of travel, and what this means for our reading of early modern travel writing now, including in the context of editing.
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The guest lecture will be followed by a workshop on Travel Writing, jointly organised by CLIC researchers focusing on this genre. Apart from this engagement, Prof. Din-Kariuki will also participate in the Meritocracy and Literature (MERLIT) project’s Theory and Methodology Workshop on 4 March. Please find more information about Prof. Din-Kariuki and about both workshops in the file below.
Natalya Din-Kariuki is an Associate Professor in the Department of English & Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. Her research examines the literary and intellectual history of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with a particular focus on travel writing, transnational and transcultural encounters, modes of cosmopolitanism, and rhetoric and poetics. She is currently completing a book on seventeenth-century English travel writing, material from which has been published in Textual Practice, the Review of English Studies, and elsewhere. With Subha Mukherji and Rowan Williams, she edited Crossings: Migrant Knowledges, Migrant Forms (2025). Finally, with Guido van Meersbergen, she is editing a volume of decolonial approaches to the history of travel.