Swedish Images of Italy: Travel Literature in the Age of Liberty

A period as guest researcher at the Swedish Institute in Rome allows me to further develop my project on Swedish travelogues from Italy during the Age of Liberty (1719-1772).

To combine research and teaching is an important prerequisite to develop the orientation and configuration of teaching. Given the importance of travel literature for the development of the novel in the eighteenth century my research in Rome will directly benefit my students at Umeå University. My stay as guest researcher at the Swedish Institute will thus result in a strengthening of both teaching and research on early modern literature in Umeå.

During this period, I will carry out archival- and library research in Rome and Italy in order to contextualise and compare the information provided by Swedish travellers in their writings. I will also write two additional chapters in my monograph on the subject.

My stay will give an important contribution to research on Swedish-Italian cultural relations during the eighteenth century. My participation in the educational activities of the institute – both in the Art history course and in a series of seminars on eighteenth-century antiquity reception – strengthens its courses and seminars by adding an analysis of the important literary and cultural contacts between Sweden and Italy in the seventeenth- and eighteenth centuries to the institute s core archaeology and art history curriculum.