ISTW Executives & Steering Committee
PRESIDENT
Tim Youngs
Tim Youngs is Professor of English and Travel Studies at Nottingham Trent
University. In 1997 he founded the journal Studies
in Travel Writing (published
by Taylor & Francis from 2009), which he continues to edit. His books
include Travellers in Africa (Manchester University Press, 1994), The
Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing (ed. with Peter Hulme, CUP, 2002), Perspectives
on Travel Writing (ed. with Glenn Hooper, Ashgate, 2004), and Travel
Writing in the Nineteenth Century (ed., Anthem, 2006). He is series editor with
Peter Hulme of the research monograph series Routledge
Research in Travel Writing. In 2003 he established Nottingham Trent's Centre for Travel Writing
Studies. From 2004 to 2009 he served on the Council of the Hakluyt Society.
His interests in travel writing are wide-ranging but his own research focuses
on post-1900 texts, in particular African-American, modernist, and radical
travel narratives.
Professor Tim Youngs
School of Arts and Humanities
Nottingham Trent University
Clifton Lane
Nottingham
NG11 8NS,
UK
E-Mail:tim.youngs@ntu.ac.uk
VICE PRESIDENT
Waldemar Zacharasiewicz
Waldemar Zacharasiewicz is University Professor at the Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik at the University of Vienna in Austria and the author of numerous books and essays related to travel writing, the literature and culture of the American South and Canadian fiction, especially their transatlantic ties.
He is a member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the director of
the Canadian Studies Centre at the University of Vienna.
Among his monographs is Images of Germany in American
Literature (2007).
He has edited books such as Transatlantische Differenzen/Transatlantic
Differences (2004), The Many Souths: Class
in Southern Culture, Transatlantic Perspectives (2003), and Images
of Central Europe in Travelogues and Fiction by North American Writers (1995). With colleagues, he has co-edited collections
such as Transatlantic Exchanges: The American South
in Europe, Europe in the American South, ed. together with Richard Gray (2007) and Canadian
Interculturality and the Transatlantic Heritage (2005).
VICE PRESIDENT & MEMBERSHIP OFFICER
Russ Pottle
Russ Pottle is Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at Regis College, in Weston, Massachusetts. His areas of research are in American travel writing, Hemingway studies, and cultural criticism. He has published work on the early writing of Melville, the intersection between travel writing and autobiography, and Hemingway's struggle with celebrity. Projects in progress include co-editing a volume of criticism on African-American travel writing and contributing to a forthcoming volume on Hemingway and Spain.
In addition to service with the ISTW, he is a past-president and member
of the Board of Advisors for the Society for American Travel Writing, a
member society of the American Literature Association. At Saint Joseph
Seminary College, in Saint Benedict, Louisiana, he held the Abbot David
Melancon Endowed Professorship in literature.
TREASURER
Sharon Ouditt
Sharon Ouditt is Reader in English at Nottingham Trent University. She
has published widely on the subject of women writers and the First World
War, but in recent years her research has focussed on travel writing, with
specific reference to the relationship between England and Italy.
Her published essays and articles refer to figures such as Henry Swinburne,
Richard Keppel Craven, Craufurd Tait Ramage, Edward Lear, George Gissing,
Norman Douglas and Janet Ross. As well as being a member of the Travel
Writing Centre at Nottingham Trent, she has been on the steering committee
of the British Academy-funded In Medias Res project. She is presently completing
a monograph on British travel writers in Southern Italy.
EXECUTIVE SECRETARY
Donald Ross
As Professor of English at the University of Minnesota, Donald Ross organized the first North American travel writing conference in November 1997. Since then he has edited and circulated the monthly newsletter, "Snapshot Traveller," which is distributed to 800 people worldwide.
With Jim Schramer he edited and wrote introductions to two volumes for the Dictionary of Literary Biography series on American travel writers in the 19th century (numbers 183 and 189).
He is currently working on studies of American visitors to Britain in the mid-nineteenth century and on Elizabethan and Stuart explorers in North America.
STEERING COMMITTEE MEMBER
Benjamin Colbert
Benjamin Colbert is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Wolverhampton, joint Director of its Centre for Transnational and Transcultural Research (established 2009), as well as Book Review Editor for European Romantic Review published by Taylor and Francis. His areas of research are Romantic Period literature and European culture, travel writing, and the history of book production, distribution and readership.
His books and editions include: British Satire 1785-1840 (ed., vol. 3, Pickering & Chatto, 2003), Shelley’s Eye: Travel Writing and Aesthetic Vision (Ashgate, 2005), ‘Literature Travels’ Special Issue (ed., with Glyn Hambrook, Comparative Critical Studies, 2007), Foreign Correspondence (ed, with Jan Borm and Regina Rudaitye, Cambridge Scholars Press, forthcoming 2010). He is currently editing Women’s Travel Writings in France after Napoleon, 4 vols (Chawton Library Series, Pickering & Chatto) and completing a long-term project, A Database of British Travel Writing, 1780-1840, in consultation with the Centre for Editorial and Intertextual Research (CEIR) at Cardiff University.
E-Mail:b.colbert@wlv.ac.uk
STEERING COMMITTEE MEMBER
Katherine E. Ledford
Katherine E. Ledford holds a PhD in American literature from the University of Kentucky and is the program director for and lecturer in the Center for Appalachian Studies at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina. She serves as a contributing editor for the Heath Anthology of American Literature and as book review editor for the Journal of Appalachian Studies and has published articles and reviews in ATQ, Appalachian Journal, Studies in Travel Writing, and Journal of Appalachian Studies. Dr. Ledford has co-edited Confronting Appalachian Stereotypes: Back Talk from an American Region and the media section for the Encyclopedia of Appalachia. Her current book project investigates United States national identity in the first half of the nineteenth century through an examination of travel writing about the US Mountain South.
E-Mail:ledfordke@appstate.edu
STEERING COMMITTEE MEMBER
Kristi Siegel
Kristi Siegel is Professor and Chair of the English Graduate Department and the Language, Literature, and Communication Division of Mount Mary College in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She earned her Ph.D. (1991) in Modern Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
She is the author of Women's Autobiographies, Culture, Feminism (1999, 2001), and the editor of Issues in Travel Writing: Empire, Spectacle, and Displacement (2003) and Gender, Genre & Identity in Women's Travel Writing (2004). In addition, she serves as General Editor for the book series Travel Writing Across the Disciplines and has published various articles on postmodernism, feminism, cultural theory, travel writing, and autobiography.
E-Mail:siegelkr@wi.rr.com
STEERING COMMITTEE MEMBER
William Chew III
William L. Chew III is Professor of History at Vesalius College, Brussels, where he has taught since 1987. He earned his Ph.D. at the University of Tübingen in History (magna cum laude). His research focuses on Franco-American social, cultural, and political history of the 18th and 19th centuries, using travel writings as sources and applying the theoretical framework and methods of image studies.
His work has been published in French History, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, The History Teacher, Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht, and the Selected Papers of the Consortium on Revolutionary Europe. He has contributed numerous commissioned entries to The Historical Encyclopedia of World Slavery and Women in World History: A Biographical Encyclopedia; the Encyclopedia of the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era; Slavery in the United States: A Social, Political, and Historical Encyclopedia of Antislavery, Abolition, and Emancipation; and the Encyclopedia of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars.
Chew is President of the Belgian Luxembourg American Studies Association. He has edited Images of America: Through the European Looking-Glass (1997) and National Stereotypes in Perspective: Americans in France, Frenchmen in America (2001).
STEERING COMMITTEE MEMBER
Gary Totten
Gary Totten is Associate Professor and Graduate Program Director in the
English department at North Dakota State University. He has published articles
on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American literature and
travel writing in African American Review, American Indian Quarterly, American
Literary Realism, College Literature, Dreiser Studies, MELUS, Pedagogy,
and the MLA Approaches to Teaching series. He is the editor of Memorial
Boxes and Guarded Interiors: Edith Wharton and Material Culture (U of Alabama
P, 2007). He is the secretary of the Edith Wharton Society, the secretary-treasurer
of the International Theodore Dreiser Society, and is the current chair
of the Executive Committee for the MLA Discussion Group on Travel Literature.
With Donald Pizer and Stephen Brennan, he is preparing the update to Pizer's
Theodore Dreiser: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography (1991); the updated
bibliography will be published online at the University of Pennsylvania's
Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text and Image. He is currently working
on a book-length project titled "Theodore Dreiser
and the Narratives of Travel."
STEERING COMMITTEE MEMBER
Miguel Cabanas
Miguel A. Cabañas is Associate Professor of Latin American Literature and Culture at Michigan State University. He is the author of The Cultural “Other” in Nineteenth-Century Travel Narratives: How the United States and Latin America Described Each Other (Edwin Mellen Press, 2008). He has published numerous articles on travel literature, Latin American and North American literatures and cultures in journals such as Studies in Travel Literature, Ciberletras, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, Hispanófila and Taller de Letras, He is also the Co-Director of Peace and Justice Studies.
E-Mail:mcabanas@msu.edu
STEERING COMMITTEE MEMBER
Carmen Birkle
Carmen Birkle is full Professor of American Studies at the Philipps University of Marburg, Germany. She has taught at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz and as a guest-professor at the University of Vienna and at Columbia University (New York City). Her publications, research, and teaching focus on American travel writing, ethnic and gender studies, inter- and transculturality, literature and medicine, post-colonialism, popular culture, and detective fiction. She is the author of Women’s Stories of the Looking Glass: Autobiographical Reflections and Self-Representations in the Poetry of Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, and Audre Lorde (1996) and Migration – Miscegenation – Transculturation: Writing Multicultural America into the Twentieth Century (2004) and co-editor of (Trans)Formations of Cultural Identity in the English-Speaking World (1998), Frauen auf der Spur: Kriminalautorinnen aus Deutschland, Großbritannien und den USA (2001), Sites of Ethnicity: Europe and the Americas (2004), and Asian American Studies in Europe (2006). Her current book project focuses on the intersections of North American literature and medicine.
E-Mail:birkle@staff.uni-marburg.de
IMMEDIATE PAST PRESIDENT
Tilar Mazzeo
Tilar Mazzeo is an Assistant Professor of English at Colby College in Waterville, Maine, specializing in British Romanticism and travel writing. She has published a collection of travel writing to the Middle East during the Romantic era (Travels, Explorations, and Empire: The Middle East, vol. 4, London: Pickering and Chatto, 2000), an edition of the Indian travel writing associated with the Shelley/Byron circle (Edward William's Sporting Sketches during a Short Stay in Hindustane, Romantic Circles, 2003), and articles on travel writing, emigration literature, and exploration in journals including Romanticism and European Romantic Review.
She is also the author of Plagiarism and Literary Property in the Romantic Period (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006).
FORMER PRESIDENT
Jeanne Moskal
Jeanne Moskal is Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the author of Blake, Ethics, and Forgiveness (1994); the editor of Mary Shelley's travel books for the standard edition of her works, The Novels and Selected Works of Mary Shelley (1996), 8 vols, general editor Nora Crook; and the co-editor of Teaching British Women Writers, 1750-1900 (2005).
She was the Founding President of the International Society for Travel Writing and has won two awards for graduate-student mentoring. She edits the Keats-Shelley Journal and a book series for Parlor Press, Writing Travel. Her current research on missionaries has been funded by the Lilly Foundation and by the National Endowment for the Humanities.