Natalie Cox
September 2012 start; University of Warwick: PI Dr David Lambert.
Armchair geographers, an under-appreciated group of British and Irish authors and critics, spoke, wrote, theorised and produced maps about the non-European world based not on their own observations, but using a combination of the collation, interpretation and synthesis of existing sources. Active in contemporary geographical controversies centred on RGS-IBG but with wider public resonance, they often criticised – sometimes quite rightly – the claims of contemporary explorers such as David Livingstone, Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke. Victorian armchair geography has continuing resonance in present-day debates about field science, expeditionary activity and academic knowledge (such as the notion that expeditionary research in the ‘field’ is superior to that stemming from the ‘ivory tower’).