Conference at the Max Kade Institut Madison:

Nineteenth-Century Echoes:

German Settlers and Explorers in South America

APRIL 18–20, 2022

Pyle Center Auditorium, 702 Langdon Street, Madison

Numerous German naturalists undertook exploration voyages through South America during the 19th century, in different regions and fields of knowledge. While for some of them it was rather a brief visit to a limited area, others decided to stay for many years carrying out their research and collaborating with the local scholarly community. This paper will give a brief overview on the work of those naturalists and then focus on three of them: the Prussian Alexander von Humboldtand his American expedition (1799-1804), the botanist Eduard Otto and his voyage to Cuba, Venezuela and the United States (1848-1841) and the physician Fritz Müller who emigrated in 1852 to the German community of Blumenau, Santa Catarina, and did his fieldwork over four decades mostly in solitude, but in close collaboration through correspondence with the international scholarly community.