Giovanna Ceserani, "A World Made by Travel: The Data of Classical Tourism"

Date
Fri February 24th 2023, 12:00 - 1:00pm
Event Sponsor
Department of Classics
Location
Building 110
450 Jane Stanford Way Building 110, Stanford, CA 94305
112

Description: Classical Italy attracted thousands of travelers throughout the 1700s. Referring to their journey as the "Grand Tour," travelers pursued their intellectual passions, promoted their careers, and satisfied their wanderlust, all while collecting antiquities to fill museums and estates back home. What can digitization and computational approaches tell us about this world? How does quantification affect our understanding of past lives? What is at stake in transforming historical sources into data?  

Biography: Giovanna Ceserani is Associate Professor of Classics and, by courtesy, of History at Stanford University, and current faculty director of Stanford’s Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA), where she is also directs the Grand Toor Project. Her research interests concern intellectual history of classics, archaeology and travel, and digital history. She studied classics, classical archaeology and intellectual history at Bologna University, the University of Cambridge UK and the Institute national de l’histoire de l’art in Paris, before moving to the US to join the Princeton Society of Fellows. She is the author of Italy’s Lost Greece: Magna Graecia and the making of modern archaeology (OUP 2012) and A World Made by Travel: the Digital Grand Tour (Stanford University Press Digital 2023). The recipient of a New Directions Mellon Fellowship (2012-15), she is the principal investigator for the 2023-24 Mellow Foudnation Sawyer Seminar The Data that Divide Us: Recalibrating Data Methods for New Knowledge Frameworks Across the Humanities 

Lunch will be provided at event. This event will not be available via zoom and will not be recorded.