Mobility Humanities

The book Mobilities, Literature, Culture by Marian Aguiar, Charlotte Mathieson and Lynne Pearce stems from the so-called “humanities turn” in mobility studies, and the increasing contribution of cultural geography, literary, and cultural studies to a field mostly connected to the social sciences. Tracing back to the pre-history of the new mobility paradigm, the editors underline both its interdisciplinary origins and its multi-disciplinary applications,by which complex visions of mobilities emerged over the last decades (Jensen et al.). The possible lines of research of this both historically rooted and recently growing dialogue are already charted by the editors’ profiles: In fact, Pearce has both mapped the relation between mobility studies and the humanities (Merriman and Pearce), working also on literary representations of automobilities; Mathieson has been working on mobilities analysing works from nineteenth-century British sea narratives to travel literature and the nineteenth-century novel; and, finally, Aguiar’s research has focused on migration and also on African and South Asian representations of colonial and postcolonial railways.