Travel and Tourism Graduate Research Panel

Daniel Berry

My presentation was about the public's perception of the history of Las Vegas, and how an artificially-created, masculine influence was projected on the city since its founding in the late 1800s as a "frontier town".

Catherine Ramey

My presentation centred the travels of Canadian Rev. Dr. Walter T. Currie in the 1880s to emphasise the multiple roles that missionaries adopted in foreign fields. I argued that missionaries were crucial to colonial projects of establishing and reinforcing colonial borders and “othering” colonised people. Although operating on behalf of the Canadian and American Boards in a Portuguese colony, Walter T. Currie was still part of the global imperial, settler colonial, and missionary projects that have critical legacies and implications for Angolan history and geography today. This project is adjacent to my own dissertation research, which focuses on the gendering of Canadian missionary curricula/schooling in Angola between 1880 and 1920. While going through the archives, I was struck by how many travels/tours around Angola that Currie did and wanted to investigate more critically why he was doing this in the late 1880s.

James E. Rubino

My presentation was about the ways in which Romantic aesthetic codes were utilized by nineteenth-century travelers in their manuscript travel journals. What drew me to the topic was encountering these codes in my daily life along with my coursework. Within these encounters, the question of to what extent people used these codes was a frequent question of mine. We still use roughly the same language to describe scenic aesthetics today, but how did we get to this point?

Daniel Berry

Sources I used for my research included film trailers, photographs of the physical landscape and cityscape of Las Vegas (collected by author Su Kim Chung in their work Las Vegas: Then and Now), and the Nevada Test Site Oral History Project, among others.

Catherine Ramey

I used Currie’s reports and letters from the 1880s, which are located at the United Church of Canada Archives. In the 1880s, he wrote almost weekly letters to his mother, brothers, and sisters in Canada describing Angola and Angolans. He also wrote letters and reports back to the presidents and secretaries of the Canadian Congregational Foreign Mission Society (CCFMS) and the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), which included maps of Angola and his own evaluations of certain locations for their potential as a Canadian mission centre.

James E. Rubino

I centered my research around a single manuscript travel journal, written by Anglican cleric William H. Bathurst (1796-1877), which covered two separate tours of his to Scotland, separated by thirty years in the early to mid-nineteenth century. As a source, Bathurst’s manuscript was immediately compelling to me because of its implication of having two accounts in the same source, which could form the basis of a number of different potential readings of his tours and the changes over the thirty-year gap.

Daniel Berry

The role of imagination played a large part in the historical construction of space and geography in Las Vegas. Even if one has not been there oneself, one likely has a perception or image of Las Vegas within their mind. This probably includes casinos, "Las Vegas weddings", dancing showgirls, or the James Bond film Diamonds are Forever - all elements of what I argue are artificially-inflated examples of masculinity in the city's public history. As a result, the public's imagination of the history of Vegas is one of a "boys' club".

Catherine Ramey

One of the key ideas I wanted to emphasise in this presentation is the relationship between colonialism, cartography, and knowledge production. First, Angolans were crucial to the establishment of any foreign mission stations in central Angola because they knew how to navigate the terrain and interact with other Angolans – a role which is invisible in Currie’s maps. Second, Currie’s writings and maps reveal a larger issue of knowledge creation: who has the power to decide what/who is recorded in historical documents and what/who is removed? Currie’s maps, for example, do not include the numerous Angolan homes that he passed, but how did he decide which ones to include and which ones to exclude? This presentation very clearly shows how archival documents shape our knowledge of the past and influence the work we do in the present. Currie’s maps especially contributed to colonial knowledge of Angolans and justified the need for white control of a seemingly “wild and exotic land.”

James E. Rubino

In my research, the imagination/imaginary is often the prologue and epilogue for travel in the construction of space/geography. Often, it was the reading of travelogues (or even adventure stories) by contemporary figures that helped spark the desire to travel. This aspect is even more important with the growth of the colonial adventure novel (King Solomon’s Mines, Around the World in 80 Days, etc.) and explosive growth of the tourism industry and ‘package tourism’ after the height of the Romantic movement’s popularity. Once home, these travelers would collect their notes and journals into manuscripts (if they weren’t written on the road these were often composed of myriad notes, being something akin to scrapbooks) or printed works, and so the cycle could be seen as self-sustaining.

James E. Rubino

I’ve found the research for this project to be transformative to my perception of my environment. We often associate the exotic and unusual with beauty and importance and the mundane with "bleh." By learning more about the ins and outs of the codes of the picturesque, sublime, and beautiful, I’ve developed a more appreciative frame of mind regarding my surroundings that has become a source of joy in my day-to-day.