Travelling Ecology: The Environmental Imagination in Naturalist Voyages from the Nineteenth Century

Tropische Landschaft vor Gebirge. Aquarell-Ölgemälde nach Ernst Haeckel

Image: Kurt Stüber

Isabella Engberg is a PhD student in Comparative Literature at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland. Her doctoral research project investigates the environmental imagination in scientific travel narratives from the nineteenth century. Her objects of investigation are the travel reports of Alexander von Humboldt (1814-25), Charles Darwin (1839; 1845), and Ernst Haeckel (1883). As all three naturalists have been linked to the development of the ecological sciences, she especially examines the relationship between the authors’ scientific output and their journey encounters, paying attention to the ways proto-ecological description and environmental encounter interact and come to life within their narratives. In the archives of the Ernst-Haeckel-Haus, she will conduct research relating to the production of Haeckel’s travel report from Ceylon, Indische Reisebriefe (1883). She will investigate how his original scientific notes, water colour sketches, photographs, and diary notes are fused to (in)form the narrated environments in his literary publication. 

Her stay from 15 April to 31 August in Jena is funded by the DAAD