Where to Go in Europe: Travel Writing and Toilets

Date: 
23 Nov 2009 - 5:30pm - 7:00pm
Building: 
Nador u. 11
Room: 
Hanak Room
Event type: 
Event audience: 
CEU organizers: 
Constantin Iordachi
External presenters: 
Wendy Bracewell (School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London)
CEU contact person: 
Zsuzsanna Bajó

'Where to go' has long been a preoccupation for travelers the world over -- yet travel writers have made this universal human necessity into a site of fundamental cultural difference, basing entire explanatory systems on their observations of foreign toilet habits. Wendy Bracewell will offer a brief survey of travel writing's *latrinalia*, in order to make some serious points about representations of difference, east and west.

Wendy Bracewell is Reader in Southeast European History at SSEES, UCL. She directed a large-scale research project, East Looks West: East European Travel Writing on Europe, 1550-2000. Three volumes from this project -- an anthology of translations, a volume of studies, and a bibliography, have just been published by the CEU Press under the series title* East Looks West*.