Samuel FitzGibbon

I am in the second year of a PhD in Italian, supervised by Professor Virginia Cox. I am researching early modern global travel writing. For me, this topic is a means to investigate questions of truth, falsity and persuasion during this period. Contemporaneous critics of the two sixteenth-century travel accounts that I am researching accused each author of fraud, challenging their reports of having crossed the Atlantic or ventured beyond India into Southeast Asia. I am reading these texts into a history of travel literature where fantasy and make-believe are constantly at play – from the Odyssey to Mandeville and Marco Polo and into the sixteenth century. This frames a study of the strategies that travel writers developed to advance the authority, reliability and authenticity of their works, and the approaches that readers adopted to navigate these.

I have a BA in German and Italian (Bristol, 2019) and an MPhil in European Literature and Culture (Cambridge, 2021). Outside my academic work I enjoy writing about art and contemporary visual culture (Apollo, Lampoon Italy, WWD). I love music and have worked as a studio producer at the online broadcasters Berlin Community Radio and Noods Radio (Bristol). During a year out between my BA and my MPhil I worked with the author and broadcaster John Kampfner on the Guardian Book of the Year and Sunday Times Bestseller Why the Germans Do It Better (Atlantic, 2020). During my Erasmus+ year abroad I studied at the Humboldt in Berlin and worked in Milan. I grew up in London and have dual German and British citizenship.