ISTW Executives & Steering Committee
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).
VICE PRESIDENT
Jeanne Dubino
Jeanne Dubino is a professor of English and chair of the English Department at Appalachian State University. Her fields of study are Virginia Woolf, women's studies, post-colonial literature, and travel writing. She has taught in Turkey and Kenya, and has also taught around the United States in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Louisiana.
She has delivered many papers, published short pieces, and written her own travel essays, at and in, various venues throughout Turkey, Africa, and the United States. Currently she is at work on an anthology entitled Land of Sunrise and Sundowners: Remembering Kenya.
Jeanne Dubino, Chair and Professor
Department of English
Appalachian State University
ASU Box 32052
Boone, NC 28608
828-262-3098
Fax: (828) 262-2133
E-Mail:dubinoja@appstate.edu
VICE PRESIDENT
Waldemar Zacharasiewicz
Waldemar Zacharasiewicz is University Professor at the Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik in Austria and the author of numerous books and essays related to travel writing.
He is a member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the author works 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 Canadian Interculturality and the Transatlantic Heritage: Impressions of an exploratory field trip and academic interaction in Eastern Canada / Interculturalité canadienne et héritage transatlantique : textes d'un voyage d'échanges de Toronto à Halifax (2005) and Sites of Memory and Collective Identities: Encounters, Explorations and Reflections on an interdisciplinary field trip through the American South in April 2001 (2002).
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.
TREASURER
Jim Schramer
Jim Schramer is Professor of English and Professional Writing at Youngstown State University. He has edited two volumes of essays on American travel writers for the Dictionary of Literary Biography. He has contributed essays to these volumes and to other volumes on British travel writing on such figures as Jonathan Raban, Bruce Chatwin, Colin Thubron, and Richard Harding Davis.
His other research interests include the literature of early American exploration and the Vietnam War. During military service (1966-1971), he traveled extensively throughout Asia (Thailand, Vietnam, Philippines, Korea, Taiwan, Okinawa). His European travel has included trips to the United Kingdom, France, Spain, Portugal, and Romania. He completed a 9500-mile driving tour of the western United States and the western Canadian provinces in summer 2001.
STEERING COMMITTEE MEMBER
Benjamin Colbert
Benjamin Colbert is Senior Lecturer in English and a member of the History and Governance Research Institute at the University of Wolverhampton (UK), where he specialises in nineteenth-century literature, travel writing, and the history of book production, distribution and readership. He is the author of Shelley's Eye: Travel Writing and Aesthetic Vision (Ashgate 2005), a volume editor of British Satire, 1785-1840 (5 vols, Pickering & Chatto, 2003), and the general editor of a new series, Literature in Transit, with Humanities e-Books.
He is currently leading a major project, A Database of British Travel Writing, 1780-1840 and A Biographical Dictionary of British Travel Writers and Translators, 1780-1840, in partnership with the Centre for Editorial and Intertextual Research (CEIR) at Cardiff University, a snapshot of which has been published in Cardiff Corvey: Reading the Romantic Text, 13 (Winter 2004).
He has also co-organised the bilingual international conference, Literature Travels / Literature en voyage (Telford 2005) and is co-editing a selection of essays on travel writing and cross-cultural exchange for Comparative Critical Studies (2007).
STEERING COMMITTEE MEMBER
John Cox
John Cox, Associate Professor of English at Georgia College & State University, is the author of Traveling South: Travel Narratives and the Construction of American Identity. He was a Peace Corps volunteer in Botswana from 1987-89 and a Fulbright lecturer at Sichuan University in Chengdu, China during the fall semester of 2007.
STEERING COMMITTEE MEMBER
Katherine E. Ledford
Katherine E. Ledford holds a Ph.D. in American literature from the University of Kentucky and teaches English for Gardner-Webb University and Mars Hill College, both in North Carolina.
She serves as a contributing editor for the Heath Anthology of American Literature 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 (1999) and the media section for the Encyclopedia of Appalachia (2006).
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 United States Mountain South.
STEERING COMMITTEE MEMBER
Dave Espey
David Espey teaches in the English department at the University of Pennsylvania and is Associate Undergraduate Chair. Recent publications include articles on English and American travel writing from various periods, as well as an anthology of travel literature, Writing the Journey (Longman, 2005). He has been visiting Fulbright Professor at universities in Morocco, Turkey, and Japan.
STEERING COMMITTEE MEMBER
Betty Hagglund
Betty Hagglund is a lecturer in English literature at the University of Birmingham (UK), specializing in 18th- and 19th-century British literature. She currently holds a Senior Caird Fellowship at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, where she is editing the diaries of Mary and Martha Russell, two young Birmingham women who were captured by the French Navy in 1794 en route to New England. Her Ph.D. thesis, Tourists and Travellers: Women's Non-fictional Writing about Scotland 1770-1830, explored the travel writings of Anne Grant, Sarah Murray, Dorothy Wordsworth, Sarah Hazlitt and others.
She has published on the travel writings of Cassandra Willoughby, Sarah Murray, Kate Marsden, Celia Fiennes and Jane Elizabeth Moore, along with articles on the reception of travel writing in the eighteenth century, seventeenth-century travellers and the English country house, and travel writing and domestic ritual. She is the co-editor of the Snapshot Traveler monthly newsletter.
STEERING COMMITTEE MEMBER
Kristi Siegel
Kristi Siegel is Associate Professor and Chair of the English Department and the Languages, 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). In addition, she serves as General Editor for the book series Travel Writing Across the Disciplinesand has published various articles on postmodernism, feminism, cultural theory, travel writing, and autobiography.
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
Miguel Cabanas
Newly Elected Member
STEERING COMMITTEE MEMBER
Carmen Birkle
Newly Elected Member
IMMEDIATE PAST 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.
BOOK REVIEW EDITOR
Jennifer Hayward
Jennifer Hayward received her Ph.D. in English Literature from Princeton University in 1992 and is an associate professor at the College of Wooster in Ohio. Her first book, Consuming Fictions: Active Audiences and Serial Fictions from Dickens to Soaps was chosen as a Choice Magazine Outstanding Academic Book of 1998.
Since 1996, her research has focused on British and American informal empire in Latin America, with a primary focus on 19th-century women travelers. She has spent research leaves in Chile and in Mexico, presented and organized panels on travel literature, and served as Area Chair for Tourism and Travel Literature for the World Vernacular Conference in Puebla, Mexico (formerly the Congress of the Americas).
Recent publications include articles and encyclopedia entries on Maria Graham and other nineteenth century women travelers; her new edition of Graham's Journal of a Residence in Chile has just been issued by the University of Virginia Press, and a new edition of Graham's Journal of a Voyage to Brazil (co-edited with Soledad Caballero) is forthcoming.
She is a member of the International Society for Travel Writing, the Interdisciplinary Nineteenth Century Studies association, and the Modern Language Association and is a regular participant in the British Women Writers Conference.