Karin Muller knows about adventure.
The acclaimed Swiss-born author, filmmaker and photographer has spent 20 years traveling alone to remote locales and conflict zones, learning new languages and customs, and sampling local foods, as well as dodging bullets and surviving diseases.
Her solo journeys have taken her to the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Vietnam, down the 4,000-mile Inca Road from Quito, Ecuador to Santiago, Chile, and into the cultures of Japan.
Muller will talk about her adventures in “Perilous Journeys,” on Tuesday, March 15, at noon, in Room 206, Ingraham Hall, part of the Lunchtime Lecture series presented by the Latin American, Caribbean and Iberian Studies (LACIS) Program at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
The event, which is free and open to the public, is co-sponsored by the Wisconsin Union and the Institute for Regional and International Studies (IRIS). LACIS will serve fair trade coffee from Just Coffee, as well as a variety of light snacks.
Muller has published three books – a Hitchhiking Vietnam (1998), Along the Inca Road (2000), and Japanland (2006) – and produced numerous international television documentaries, including examinations of the “secret sides” of life in Cuba and Sudan.
Her latest documentary, Egypt Beyond the Pyramids, is scheduled to premiere nationwide in May on public television.
She spent nine weeks in Egypt, living with Cairo’s garbage collectors, Nile fishermen, and Bedouin nomads, as well as covering the Morsi revolution from Tahrir Square. She was flown back to the United States for emergency surgery after being severely injured by a mob in a remote village in the Nile Delta.
Muller frequently gives lectures for the National Geographic Society and at universities across the United States. She has been featured on National Public Radio and her writing also appears in National Geographic and Traveler magazines.
For more information, contact Sarah Ripp at skripp@wisc.edu.