Award Information
I propose to undertake eleven months of research in England, France, Germany, Australia, and New Zealand investigating the publication of accounts of expeditions to Oceania in order to explicate how these voyages were crucial to the development of anthropology as a natural science in the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries. Research will take place in museums, libraries, and archives so that I may review drawings, engravings, books, correspondence, journals, and records of oral histories. I will conduct this work in preparation for writing my dissertation in which I intend to demonstrate that the pictures generated during Captain Cook's first voyage of 1768, the 1800 French Expedition to Australia, and the Russian Rurik journey around the Pacific Rim in 1815 were part of a data set that was constitutive to theorizations of race and its connection to physiological, cultural, political, and aesthetic differences.