Dr Joanna Kodzik, Junior Full Professor at MIARC, has been invited to give a guest lecture and discuss the circulation of knowledge about the Arctic together with the research group KLIMER: Climate, environment and Energy at the University of Oslo (Norway) on Wednesday Oct. 9, 4:15 PM, Håndbiblioteket, Niels Treschows Hus.
Whereas the reflections of the Enlightenment about the new world are considered to be a form of “intellectual rediscovery”, relatively few reliable facts about the Arctic were known at the beginning of the 18th century when its systematic description by scholars drawing on first-hand observation was only just beginning. During the 18th century, more and more knowledge from the Arctic reached Europe and was intensively received among German-speaking scholars.
This lecture is dedicated to the circulation of knowledge about the European Arctic - Greenland, Iceland and Lapland - in German travelogues and scholarly discourses. The lecture will give an overview on firsthand knowledge provided by German-speaking whalers, the Moravian missionaries who ran 6 mission stations in Greenland in the period from 1733-1900 and made several journeys to Iceland and Lapland, as well as other German-speaking travellers.
The focus of the lecture will be on the ‘use’ of knowledge from the Arctic in the sense of the ‘idea of a creative reception’. Dr Kodzik will notably discuss questions of who received the new knowledge from the Arctic and in what context, and how this was incorporated into own worldviews and theories to legitimize them.
Map from Cornelis Gijsbertsz Zorgdrager's Alte und neue grönländische Fischerei und Wallfischfang, Leipzig 1723.
