Monday, April 2 2018, 4:30pm The Willson Center Digital Humanities Lab, Main Library Why Walden pond might appear more virtual and a Pacific island more augmented can be better understood by returning to the archives of two print-age Pacific expeditions by James Cook and George Macartney. Both men ostensibly failed in their imperial tasks, and yet the printed journals and engravings of the expeditions, including the French wallpaper that Reihana draws upon, became fundamental to new conceptions of nature and empire in the late eighteenth century. Such media objects indicate the use of a more consciously panoramic approach to counter anxiety over erratic failures of mastery and masculinity in a revolutionary age. At the same time, material objects (taonga/taoa) brought back to London from the Pacific like the Tahitian mourner’s costume from the three Cook voyages (1769-1779) as well as the Macartney tapestry and collection of gifts from his embassy to Beijing (1793) could belie optimistic visions of empire and prove resistant panoramic strategies of synthesis. Key to the power of Reihana’s and Fullerton’s interventions is their use of archival strategies that return the participant to the disjunctions of the revolutionary panoramic, highlighting the uneasy relation between a totalizing technoscientific optimism and the archive. See the UGA Willson Center web site for more details. Robert Batchelor is professor of history and director of digital humanities at Georgia Southern University. He is the author of London: The Selden Map and the Making of a Global City, 1549-1689 (Chicago, 2014). With Sari Gilbert, he created the board game Fujian Trader (2016) based on his discovery of the Selden Map of China. He is currently working on several projects related to maritime and ocean history. Reception to Follow ● The Georgia Colloquium in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century British Literature is funded by the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts and the English Department’s Rodney Baine Lecture Fund ● Co-sponsored by the UGA History Department and the Willson Center Digital Humanities Lab ● Free & Open to the Public
