Digital History and 18th-Century Journeys to Italy

Digital History and 18th-Century Journeys to Italy

Speaker: Professor Giovanna Ceserani (Stanford University)

Joint session with the Early Modern Italian World Seminar

Tuesday 18th February 2025, 2pm

Old Dining Hall, St Edmund Hall, Oxford

All welcome

The Grand Tour of Italy attracted thousands of British travellers throughout the eighteenth century. It was a formative institution of modernity, contributing to a massive reimagining of politics and the arts, of the market for culture, of ideas about leisure, and of practices of professionalism. But this significance has been hard to track among rich but dispersed records, so that for long, scholarship has focused on the best documented, and mostly elite, travellers. This paper will share work from the ongoing Grand Tour Project which has been developing digital tools and an interactive database to widen the scope of study to thousands of diverse Grand Tour travellers. It will illustrate case-studies from the recently published book A World Made by Travel: the Digital Grand Tour as well as new lines of research extending this data work further, while also asking what the stakes are in conducting and disseminating historical research in the digital age, and what are the new possibilities for collective biography in particular.

Biography:

Giovanna Ceserani is Professor of Classics and (by courtesy) of History at Stanford University. She is the author of Italy's Lost Greece: Magna Graecia and the Making of Modern Archaeology (OUP 2012) and the director of the Grand Tour Project, on which, in addition of A World Made by Travel, she has also published two co-authored studies: 'Historical Research in a Digital Age: Reflections from the Mapping the Republic of Letters Project', and ‘British Travelers in 18th-century Italy: The Grand Tour and the Profession of Architecture.’ Her research focuses on the classical tradition with an emphasis on the intellectual history of classical scholarship, historiography and archaeology from the eighteenth century onwards. A recipient of the Mellon Foundation New Directions Fellowship as well as of a Getty Research Grant, she is now the Faculty Director of the Stanford Center for Spatial and textual Analysis (CESTA), working to bring new technologies to serve humanistic research.

Find out more about the Digital Humanities and Sensory Heritage Network here.