Alexander von Humboldt and America

Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) was one of the great travellers and one of the great travel writers. Revered in his day across Europe and America, his star declined in the English-speaking world after he died, with the result that new translations of his work have only relatively recently started to appear. The 150th anniversary of his death seemed a suitable occasion to take stock of this charismatic figure, so a conference was organised at The British Academy on 27 November 2009 under the title ‘Alexander von Humboldt and America’. Of the nine papers given that day, four appear here in this special issue of Studies in Travel Writing, along with a symposium on Laura Dassow Walls's important new book, The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America. Thanks are due to the British Academy for hosting the conference, to Marina Warner, who co-organised it, and to the AHRC-supported project, American Tropics: Towards a Literary Geography, based at the University of Essex, which provided some financial support.