CoAS Seminar SeriesThe Empire Walks

The Empire Walks: The Scholarly Monograph as an Experiment in Curiosity
Dr. Vivian Kao, HSSC Dept
Lawrence Technological University

Thursday, September 19, 2024

The Empire Walks is the title of Dr. Kao's current scholarly book project. The book examines depictions of pedestrian movement in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature about the British Empire, and explores the relationship between foot travel and questions of gender, race, progress, and power. In this talk, Dr. Kao uses her book project as a case study for thinking about the scholarly monograph as an experiment, much like a scientific experiment that utilizes an experimental method. The monograph takes a scholar's personal curiosity and grounds it within the framework of a field or discipline. The talk is a meta-cognitive exploration of humanistic experimental methiod, and of what it means to use the scholarly book as a mechanism by which to put one's curiosity in the service of disciplinary knowledge-making.