Andrea Wulf — The Traveler
Historian Andrea Wulf discusses her new biography of a naturalist explorer whose quest to understand our shared humanity across difference remains urgently relevant.
Why we picked this
Wulf's 'The Invention of Nature' made Alexander von Humboldt one of the most talked-about historical figures of the last decade — she brings the same gift for recovering lost intellectual lives to a new subject.
Andrea Wulf’s The Invention of Nature, a biography of Alexander von Humboldt, became a surprise bestseller by recovering a figure who had been largely forgotten outside Germany and placing him at the center of the history of environmentalism, Romanticism, and scientific exploration. Her new book, The Traveler, turns to another explorer whose quest to document the natural world and understand human commonality across cultures shaped Enlightenment thought.
Wulf is a meticulous archival historian who writes with the narrative propulsion of a novelist — a combination that has made her one of the most successful writers of science and intellectual history working today. Her books tend to recover figures who influenced everyone but are credited by few, and to show how ideas about nature, science, and human society are entangled in ways that disciplinary history often obscures.
The Traveler arrives at a moment when questions about what connects people across cultures and the role of curiosity in bridging division are not merely historical. Wulf’s ability to make eighteenth and nineteenth-century intellectual life feel alive and consequential makes her events among the most reliably rewarding on the DC calendar.