CfP: Revisiting European Maritime Exploration in the Pacific Ocean
Travis Seifman
I am not involved in this project, but thought I would pass along this Call for Papers from the Estonian Maritime Museum, for those here who might be interested.
Art Research Center
Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto
Eesti Meremuuseum / Estonian Maritime Museum
REVISITING EUROPEAN MARITIME EXPLORATION IN THE PACIFIC OCEAN (C. 1750–1850)
In recent decades, scholars, activists, and artists have reassessed and challenged existing interpretations of European encounters with the Pacific as they occurred on shore and ship, in text and on maps, in song and dance, and in public art and museums. This volume seeks to bring together scholarship on European maritime expeditions to the Pacific in the second half of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth centuries. It wants to interrogate not only what happened on these expeditions, but how they have been catalogued and commemorated over time.
The theme is inspired in particular by the legacy left by Adam Johann von Krusenstern, an Estonian-born Baltic German hydrographer in the Russian service, whose magnum opus – Atlas of the Pacific Ocean – was published between 1824 and 1827. Born in 1770, by the time of his death in 1846 many of the pressing geographical questions that had motivated his career had been resolved, but the precise role of the Pacific in the global imperial web of European power was still unclear. Additionally, items he and his crew collected today pepper museum collections across Europe. This volume will therefore focus on themes brought into relief by Krusenstern, including:
- The practice and materiality of Pacific cartography, hydrography, and geography
- European networks of explorers and geographers
- Practicalities of maritime exploration including ships, crew, equipment, supplies, funding, political support, etc.
- Agency and encounters, in person, in print, and in museums and other commemorative spaces
- Knowledge transfer between historical actors, local communities, museums, academia, and other audiences
The volume aims to share new perspectives on European exploration in the Pacific Ocean from the Arctic to the Antarctic and from the Americas to Asia, ca. 1750–1850. Some of the contributions stem from a conference held at the Estonian Maritime Museum in November 2025, part of a series of events to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the publication of Krusenstern's Atlas (1824-7).
Chapters are to be no more than 8,000 words inclusive of footnotes, captions, and appendices. In addition to scholarly essays, we encourage alternative submission formats, including reflections on artistic responses or exhibitions, roundtables, picture essays, etc.
Please submit an abstract of 200 words and one-page cv to feliks.go...@meremuuseum.ee and k.pa...@rgs.org by 30 June 2026. If selected, we expect submission of chapters by 1 February 2027 to be sent for anonymous peer review. Publication will be with the University of Tartu Press and is expected in 2028. Please also use the above email addresses for any queries.
Dr Feliks Gornischeff, Estonian Maritime Museum
Dr Katherine Parker, Royal Geographical Society