Alexander Smith and Dr. Rob McFarland, Department of Germanic and Slavic
Before beginning this project I was aware of the vast variety of literature available in both English and German language. Having been fortunate enough to work with Dr. McFarland already on the Sophie Project, an undertaking of the Department of German and Russian here at BYU. However, I was aware that much of the existing travel literature from Ida Pfeiffer had not been collected— additionally, the original Fraktur script made it difficult for less-experienced German speakers to read and understand. In this project, I opted to transcribe and annotate the travels of Ida Pfeiffer in the United States. Being a European myself, I was excited to begin work on this specific area of literature regarding German women’s thought on America.
While working on my ORCA project I was able to spend much time searching for and reading a wide variety of writing from German women authors, who wrote about the new world, from Canada through North America to Brazil and Argentina. This gave me an insight to how Europeans, and in particular German women, thought about the New World during the 19th and 20th centuries, and how their world differed from what they had experienced in the New World. The project ran smoothly for the most part and I have made great progress. Unfortunately, I underestimated the amount of work needed to complete the annotations and this section is an ongoing process which I will complete during the first year of my graduate studies. Many of the notes, including the transcription, however, are complete and this would not have been possible without the funding of the ORCA department or the mentorship and constant encouragement of Dr. Rob McFarland.
I am grateful for the opportunity to have worked on this project, and my on-going commitment to the Sophie Project at BYU as an editor will ensure that this work will be published and made available to the public.