About the Project
This fellowship provided students with the opportunity to deeply engage with Daniel Defoe’s novel, Robinson Crusoe, in changing ideas of place in the eighteenth-century Anglophone worlds. Fellows confront questions relating to how place was once conceived from how it was later conceived, and why this shift matters for how we read Defoe or British travel literary writ large. Students traced Crusoe’s traveling trajectory along the three interlocking developments in geography: the revolution of infrastructure, the circulation of goods, and the mapping of the world with reference to Defoe’s contemporary cartographer Herman Moll and his own A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain. This research project illuminates the material, visual, and cognitive culture of a telling phrase of Robinson Crusoe, “It is as impossible, as needless, to set down the innumerable Crowd of Thought that whirl’d through that great thorow-fare of the Brain.” Fellows learned how Robinson Crusoe participates not only in reinventing a community, devising tropes, characters, and settings for interaction, but how it also provides a critique of its communal, communicative truth claim, one which re-imagines, for instance, an on-going and large-scale convergence of laissez-faire, information, and culture. Students collaborated to create a cognitive mapping of spatial navigation by John O’Keefe, the Nobel prize winner in physiology or medicine in 2014.
Mentors
Jeong Oh Kim; Ryan King; Stacy Curry-Johnson
Fellows
Alysia Shang; Hadley Williamson
Project
Fellows’ interactive mapping project is available here.