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Talk on graphic tourism trade cards slated April 3 4:57 p.m., March 19, 2007--“The Graphic Tourism Geographies of the Liebig Company: Trade Cards and the Semiotics of Travel Representations” is the topic of a lecture scheduled for 4:30 p.m., Tuesday, April 3, at the University of Delaware. The talk, by A. V. Seaton, Whitbread professor of tourism behavior at the University of Bedfordshire (formerly Luton) and director of the International Tourism Research Centre there, will be held in the Class of 1941 Lecture Room in the Morris Library. The talk is free and open to the public. The illustrated talk looks at chromolithographed trade cards, an early form of business cards that functioned as advertising and became popular collectibles. It traces the physical and technical background, the audiences and the coding strategies used to construct the tourism worlds of Europe in the 19th century. The Liebig Company's cards--intended to be collectibles and collected today as material objects prized for their aesthetic appeal and the high quality of printing and design--offer a cultural insight into their period. In a pre-television era, such trade cards and postcards were used for decoration and served as a significant influence on the imaging of a wide range of subjects. In terms of tourism they diffused images of peoples and places (including towns, rivers, islands, countries) that represented elements of the picturesque and the exotic, which still underpin many elements in tourism promotion today. In looking at Liebig cards it is possible to identify ideological themes related to place imagery that are exploited in modern representations of destinations. Seaton has received an honors degree in the social sciences, a master's degree in literature from Oxford University, and a doctorate in tourism from Strathclyde University. For more than 20 years he has taught and conducted research in the fields of cultural studies, graphic history and travel. His main interests have been in media studies and popular culture, travel history and travel literature. Between 1992 and 1998, he was Reader in Tourism at the University of Strathclyde and in 1993 founded Scottish Tourism Research, which advised governments on cultural tourism. The author or editor of five books, Seaton has published numerous articles and papers and is on the editorial board of two international tourism journals. In 1990, he edited The Travel Journals of George Clayton Atkinson in Iceland and the Westmanna Islands, a book which Queen Elizabeth presented to the president of Iceland as an official present from the people of England on her state visit. A fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, Seaton has lectured and been a visiting fellow or professor in 60 countries. His current research projects include literary travel in Sicily 1773-1914; monasteries and monastic travel in British cultural history; the semiotics of travel and tourism artifacts and completion of a history of travel associated with death. The University of Delaware holds many resources relevant to the The lecture is sponsored by the Center for Material Culture Studies, the University of Delaware Library and the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection at the UD library. The Lasner Collection room will be open after the lecture, and light refreshments will be available. For more information, call (302) 831-2231. |
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