Over the past few years, Alexander von Humboldt has increasingly gained in presence and in status within anglophone scholarship as his works have come to be acknowledged as seminal texts in the development of science, exploration and travel in the modern era. This is in no small part due to recent work by British and American scholars from a range of different backgrounds, including literary and cultural studies, history, geography and the history of science, who have placed Humboldt's achievements fairly and squarely on the map of nineteenth-century intellectual (scientific) progress. But important inroads are also being made by international bodies of scholars working across different cultures, languages and histories – not least those who have contributed to the University of Chicago's Humboldt in English series – to reassert and reappraise the relevance of Humboldt's work for modern scholarship.

This collection of eight articles constitutes an important new body of writing on Humboldt which, read in dialogue with the eight translated excerpts from his correspondence and diaries with which this collection closes, brings the interdisciplinary and transcultural nature of the original Humboldtian project to the fore. The opening chapter by Laura Dassow Walls explores how Humboldt's ideas were received at the final destination of his voyage, in North America, in which two competing ideologies were in operation – the first a global cosmopolitanism of the kind that Humboldt himself endorsed, and the second an ‘increasingly supercharged and expansionist nationalism’ (p. 23). The interdisciplinary, wide-ranging nature of Humboldt's works, Dassow Walls argues, could be harnessed by a variety of different groups to feed a series of quite different preoccupations: as an impetus for the Romantic generation to celebrate the poetic power and individual identity of their homeland; as inspiration for the artist Frederic Church's sublime landscapes; and as the celebration of Humboldt as a second ‘Columbus’, a second (scientific) discoverer of America. Neil Safier's contribution likewise reflects on the significance of landscape and space, albeit through the lens of early modern science, which regarded the Torrid Zone as uninhabitable. The French scientist Charles-Marie de la Condamine and the Jesuit missionary Antonio de Ulloa offered an important corrective to this, although it was Humboldt who was the first to free the indigenous peoples from being labelled inferior. In her chapter on Humboldt's contribution to climatology, Suzanne Zeller likewise focuses on the different meanings that could be accorded to landscape, but does so from the perspective of Canadian and British expeditions charting the climate, weather, air and soil temperatures of the Great Northwest, with clear commercial and expansionist aims in mind.

The following chapter, by Christiana Borchart de Moreno and Segundo E. Moreno Yánez, also pursues the question how Humboldtian landscape perceptions have shaped questions of national identity. Taking the history of Ecuador as their focus, they place Humboldt's writing within a longer tradition of reports and maps of the Amazon River, and argue that Humboldt's preoccupation with Chimborazo, illustrated in his Vues des Cordillères et Monumens des peuples indigènes de l'Amérique (1811), played a central role in enhancing the visibility of this nation and country for a European readership. Tobias Kraft's contribution, similarly concerned with the visual, focuses on the literary practices deployed to re-create nature in Humboldt's writing. Kraft asserts that Humboldt's accounts turn upon the use of fractal structures, to be understood as ‘a recursive motif that carries in itself the formula of the object to which it refers’ (p. 147). Humboldt's technique of textual layering enables complex landscape images to emerge which are richly multi-perspectival, bringing experience, observation and the imagination together in ways which, Kraft persuasively argues, are more carefully constructed than one might initially think.

Where de Moreno and Moreno Yánez offered greater insight into Humboldt's relationship with Ecuador, Christopher Iannini argues in his chapter that Cuba has tended to be overlooked by Humboldt scholars, in part because the Political Essay on the Island of Cuba simply became one chapter hidden amongst the many that make up the seven volumes of Helen Maria Williams's Personal Narrative, or was so radically mistranslated by John Thrasher for the American market that this text could barely be trusted. Only with the appearance of the 2011 retranslation is it now possible to better understand the contribution that Humboldt's work made to European knowledge of Caribbean culture. Michael Dettelbach's contribution likewise seeks to reinforce the historical significance of Humboldt's work by reconnecting his work as a scientist with his training as a Prussian official and minor inspector. Within the context of German cameralism – the science of administration that turned upon ‘describing and systematising the political community’ (p. 186) – Humboldt's endeavours to organize scientific knowledge could therefore be seen as the extension of those new ways of thinking which, in a different professional guise, he was implementing at home. In a similar vein, the final chapter, by Ottmar Ette, explores how knowledge was produced by Humboldt on his travels, and the importance he accorded to the role played by scientific instruments in enabling him to record and process data that covered an extraordinary range of different disciplines. Ette persuasively argues that Humboldt's research should be considered the endeavour not of ‘the last universal scholar’ (p. 215), but rather of a figure who was at the hub of a highly modern and forward-looking global intellectual network that was transdisciplinary, intercultural and deeply cosmopolitan.

This vibrant cross-disciplinary study of the latest developments in research on Alexander von Humboldt not only demonstrates just how rich the field of enquiry surrounding his work has recently become, but also charts exciting new courses that highlight his continuing relevance for modern scholarship.