We are delighted to have our NTU colleague and CTWS member Andrew Taylor discuss the theme of travel in his poetry at this research seminar, reading and book launch. He will be reading from a number of his volumes and will be focusing in particular on his new collection, Not There – Here, published by Shearsman Books in October 2021. A review of that work, by Alan Baker, may be found in Tears in the Fence at this link. If you would like to join the session please email Andrew Taylor, Tim Youngs, or CTWS@ntu.ac.uk The session is co-hosted by the CTWS and NTU's English Research Seminar series and will be chaired by Tim Youngs.

Abstract
Through discussion and readings of my poems this research seminar will consider the poetics of travel writing. It will consider continuities and departures, the role of influence (including that of institutional research contexts), the use of form and poetic constraints, technologies of travel and communication, and the representation of place and movement, both human and non-human. The seminar will trace the theme of travel through my earlier collections, including Radio Mast Horizon (Shearsman, 2013), March (Shearsman, 2017) and Aire (Red Ceilings, 2018), and in my new collection of poetry, Not There—Here, published by Shearsman in October 2021. The new book takes the reader from England into pre and post-Brexit Europe, negotiating the arrival of the nightingale, European breakfasts, fast trains into Paris and the ‘beautiful drift’ of the French landscape. Further consideration will be given to the publication of small-press titles, which has been a long-favoured mode of poetry publishing. The seminar is held in conjunction with NTU’s Centre for Travel Writing Studies.

We are delighted to welcome (albeit virtually) Professor Michael Cronin, who will be giving a paper, via Microsoft Teams, on 'Journeying in the Age of the Anthropocene' on Wednesday 28th April 2021, 1-2 pm, BST. If you are interested in joining please email tim.youngs@ntu.ac.uk by the end of Tuesday 27th April 2021. The format for NTU's English research seminars is a paper of c.40 minutes and c.15 minutes Q&A.

Abstract:

Human encounters with the natural world are inseparable from the history of travel. Nature, as fearsome obstacle, a wonder to behold or a source of therapeutic refuge, is bound up with the story of human mobility. Stories of this mobility give readers a sense of the diversity of the natural world, how they might interpret and respond to it and how human preoccupations are a help or a hindrance in maintaining bio-cultural diversity. Travel writing has constantly shaped how humans view the environment from foreign adventures to flight-shaming. If much of modern travel writing has been based on ready access to environmentally damaging forms of transport how do travel writers deal with a practice that is destroying the world they claim to cherish? This paper explores human travel encounters with the environment over the centuries and asks what is the future for travel writing in the age of the Anthropocene?

Bio:
Michael Cronin is 1776 Professor of French at Trinity College, Dublin. He has published extensively on language, culture, translation and travel writing. Among his works are Across the Lines: travel, language, translation (2000), Translation and Identity (2006), The Expanding World: towards a politics of microspection (2012) and Eco-Translation: translation and ecology in the Age of the Anthropocene (2017). His current interests are in developing eco-criticism in relation to modern languages and translation, exploring the notion of ‘translation trauma’ in relation to population displacement and investigating language identities as mediated through travel.

The AHRC-funded Midlands4Cities Doctoral Training Partnership (M4C) brings together eight leading universities across the Midlands to support the professional and personal development of the next generation of arts and humanities doctoral researchers. M4C is a collaboration between the University of Birmingham, Birmingham City University, University of Warwick, Coventry University, University of Leicester, De Montfort University, Nottingham Trent University and The University of Nottingham. 
 M4C is awarding up to 89 doctoral studentships for UK/EU applicants for 2020 through an open competition and 21 Collaborative Doctoral Awards (CDA) through a linked competition with a range of partner organisations in the cultural, creative and heritage sector.
English at Nottingham Trent University is inviting applications from students whose research interests connect with our fields of expertise in:

• American literature and cultural history
• Colonial, postcolonial, global, and world literatures and cultures
• Contemporary literature and culture
• Creative writing and critical-creative research
• Literature and environmentalism
• Gender and sexuality
• Gothic literature
• Literary and cultural theory
• Literature and technology
• Literature, film and visual culture
• Magazine and periodical writing
• Medical Humanities
• Modernism
• Poetry and poetics
• Popular fiction
• Race, Rights and Activist Writing
• Romantic literature
• Shakespeare and Early Modern writing
• Travel writing
• War and literature
• Women’s writing

The deadline for M4C funding applications is 13 January 2021 (noon), by which time students must have applied for a place to study and have ensured that two academic references are submitted using the Midlands4Cities online reference form. 

For full details of eligibility, funding, research supervision areas and CDA projects, and for dates of our November application writing workshops, please visit  https://www.midlands4cities.ac.uk or contact enquiries@midlands4cities.ac.uk

We are delighted to have been awarded Midlands 4 Cities funding for a collaborative doctoral award with the National Railway Museum for a project on 'Writing the Train: Accounts of Railway Travel'. The deadline is 13 January 2021 (at noon, UK time) but potential applicants who meet the eligibility criteria are advised to email any inquiries to Tim Youngs well in advance.

In celebration of Global Week at Nottingham Trent University here is a blog post by guest editor Sofia Aatkar, an AHRC and M3C- Funded PhD student in the Centre for Travel Writing Studies, originally written in February 2017.


​The talk took place on the final day of Nottingham Trent’s Global Week; the day dedicated to ‘The Americas and Caribbean’. At Nottingham Trent, Global Week is an annual undertaking and has been since I was an undergraduate (at least). My primary aims for the session included: 1) emphasise the importance of travel within a Caribbean context, 2) encourage participants to think widely about the significance of postcolonial travel writing, and 3) promote discussion about the different ways in which authors from the Caribbean engage with European models of travel writing. I planned to consider three extracts throughout the session. The first was from The European Tribe (1987) by Caryl Phillips, the second from Sequins for a Ragged Hem (1988) by Amryl Johnson, and the final from Behind the Frontlines: Journey into Afro-Britain (1988) by Ferdinand Dennis.[1] These texts invite comparison because, despite their disparate destinations, their authors all interrogate legacies of slavery and colonisation throughout their narratives, and subsequently are considered, by some, to be counter-discursive. After we had discussed the Caribbean region, its relationship with travel, and situated Caribbean travel writing within the conceptual framework of postcolonial travel writing, we discussed Phillips’ The European Tribe. I gave the participants an extract from text that described Phillips’ experiences in Amsterdam. The participants identified Phillips’ depiction of Amsterdam’s black residents, the American tourists, and his historical commentary about the propaganda during World War II as highly significant. We contemplated how Phillips undercuts the liberal nature of Amsterdam’s society with his description of black prostitutes and drug addicts, discussed how Phillips’ portrayal of the American tourists could be considered ‘snobbish’, and how his sense of superiority, as a travel writer, creates a distinction between the terms ‘traveller’ and ‘tourist’. We concluded by talking about Phillips’ reflections on the Anne Frank House, and about how the propaganda that promoted the persecution of Jewish people during World War II, as described by Phillips, was repeated within the discourse surrounding the ‘leave’ campaign before the 2016 Brexit referendum in Britain. This led to a reflection on how far (if at all) European society has progressed in terms of its treatment of those who might be considered racially, culturally, or religiously Other.
            Approximately a month before my Global Week talk, Granta issued a series of short articles that responded to the troubling question ‘Is Travel Writing Dead?’ Overwhelmingly (and thankfully), the response was a resounding no, with several of the authors arguing for travel writing’s importance within social and political contexts in the contemporary era.[2]  This sentiment, I feel, was reflected by the participants’ brilliant and insightful comments about an extract from The European Tribe – a travel narrative published thirty years ago. Their engaged discussion, and particularly their points about World War II and Brexit, demonstrated travel writing’s enduring relevance in a society that is preoccupied with borders and belonging. This idea was augmented by the travel writing exhibition in Clifton Library, erected for Global Week and curated by Dr Rebecca Butler. This exhibition showcased the original research and creative practice undertaken by postgraduate and staff associates of the Centre for Travel Writing Studies at Nottingham Trent, and further demonstrates a growing interest in travel writing.
 
 
 
Works Cited
Dennis, Ferdinand, Behind the Frontlines: Journey into Afro-Britain (London: Victor
 Gollancz, 1988)
Hamid, Mohsin, ‘Is Travel Writing Dead?’, Granta, 138 (2017) < https://granta.com/is-travel-writing-dead-hamid/ > [accessed 27th February 2017]
Johnson, Amryl, Sequins for a Ragged Hem (London: Virago Press, 1988)
Laing, Olivia, ‘Is Travel Writing Dead?’, Granta, 138 (2017) < https://granta.com/olivia-laing-travel-writing-dead/  > [accessed 27th February 2017]
Phillips, Caryl, The European Tribe (New York: Vintage, 2000)


[1] Caryl Phillips, The European Tribe (New York: Vintage, 2000); Amryl Johnson, Sequins for a Ragged Hem (London: Virago Press, 1988); Ferdinand Dennis, Behind the Frontlines: Journey into Afro-Britain (London: Victor Gollancz, 1988).

[2] The following articles from Granta’s series provide especially interesting reflections on the relevance of travel writing today: Mohsin Hamid, ‘Is Travel Writing Dead?’, Granta, 138 (2017) < https://granta.com/is-travel-writing-dead-hamid/ > [accessed 27th February 2017]; Olivia Laing ‘Is Travel Writing Dead?’, Granta, 138 (2017) < https://granta.com/olivia-laing-travel-writing-dead/ > [accessed 27th February 2017].

The Midlands3Cities Doctoral Training Partnership (M3C) is a collaboration between the University of Birmingham, Birmingham City University, De Montfort University, University of Leicester, Nottingham Trent University and The University of Nottingham. M3C is awarding up to 80 PhD Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) studentships for UK/EU applicants for 2018 entry.

M3C is also awarding 7 Collaborative Doctoral Awards with partner organisations: Flatpack Festival, Leicester City Council, Nottingham City Museums and Galleries, Nottingham Contemporary, Oxford Lieder, Royal Shakespeare Company, and Spalding Gentlemen's Society.

M3C provides research candidates with expert supervision (including cross-institutional supervision where appropriate), research training and access to a wide range of facilities, cohort events and placement opportunities with regional, national and international partners in the cultural, creative and heritage sectors.

English at Nottingham Trent University is inviting applications from students whose research interests include:

• American literature and cultural history
• Colonial, postcolonial, global, and world literatures and cultures
• Creative writing and critical-creative research
• Gender and sexuality
• Literary and cultural theory
• Literature and technology
• Literature, film and visual culture
• Magazine and periodical writing
• Modernist and postmodernist literature
• Poetry and poetics
• Popular fiction
• Race, Rights and Activist Writing
• Romantic literature
• Shakespeare and Early Modern writing
• TRAVEL WRITING
• War and literature
• Women’s writing

The deadline for M3C funding applications is Monday 15 January 2018, by which time students must have applied for a place to study and have ensured that two academic references are submitted to the home university on the correct M3C form. For full details of eligibility, funding, research supervision areas and CDA projects, and for dates of our November application writing workshops, please visit www.midlands3cities.ac.uk or contact enquiries@midlands3cities.ac.uk.

Guest editor: John Culbert

Travel writing as a field of study owes a great deal to “theory” – the critical methodologies that emerged from structuralism and the social movements of the ’60s and ’70s. Theory, in turn, owes a good deal to travel writing, whose hybrid, biographical, and often non-canonical texts were invaluable source materials for those social movements and poststructuralist critical trends. One of the innovations of Edward Said’s landmark Orientalism (1978) was precisely its critical focus on travel writing; in this way the book synthesized broader intellectual concerns about travel, power, desire and discourse in a postcolonial, globalizing world. Over the subsequent years, postcolonial studies, anthropology, cultural studies and literary criticism, among other fields, increasingly drew on travel writing to illuminate the social and political stakes of travel, tourism, and the representation of other cultures – or what a suspicious Paul de Man, still beholden in 1979 to a certain Eurocentric formalism, disparaged as “the foreign affairs, the external politics of literature.”
 
Forty years after Orientalism, this special issue of Studies in Travel Writing reconsiders the place of travel writing in theory, and of theory in the study of travel writing. The editors are especially interested in work that can speak to the political and social stakes of travel and theory in the present historical conjuncture. What are the prospects for theory and what are the stakes of travel writing in a time of mass migrations, social disruptions, ecological crises and shifting geopolitics? Articles must be limited to 7,000 - 10,000 words. Topics may include travel writing and:
 

• Indigenous studies
• Postcolonial studies
• Critical Race Studies
• Queer theory & gender studies
• Ecological studies
• Refugees, migrations and immigration
• Biopolitics and security
• Plasticity
• Cosmopolitanism
• Mobility and disability
• Technology
• World literature

 
Send abstracts of 250 words by September 15, 2017 to jculbert@mail.ubc.ca, with subject heading “Travel and Theory Submission.”

POEMS ABOUT TRAVEL & THE EXPERIENCE OF BEING IN TRANSIT

                               ​– Carolyn Forché, ‘Travel Papers’ (2011)

Whether local or global, by foot or by ferry, we tend to look upon journeys in terms of departure and arrival. However much we enjoy or endure it, travel from one place to another is often understood simply as a means of getting from A to B.

But what happens en route? How are our thoughts set in motion during these journeys? What is the relationship between our inner selves and our surroundings? How do we interact with or ignore our fellow passengers? How does the mode of travel affect our perception of the environment? Do journeys change or confirm us? Are we different beings while travelling? And what happens when we are forced to travel, or when we no choice but to stay put?
​
In Transit is a collaboration between the Emma Press and the Centre for Travel Writing Studies at Nottingham Trent University, edited by Dr Sarah Jackson and Prof. Tim Youngs. ​

​We invite submissions of poems that deal with the experience of being in transit. Poems may describe journeys undertaken on foot, by bicycle, motorcycle, wheelchair, ambulance, bus, train, plane, boat or other mode of transport.

We welcome both formal and experimental work but are especially interested in contributions that employ poetic form to convey the sense of motion.

The deadline for submissions is 28th May 2017. 

Further details and online submission form: 
https://theemmapress.com/about/submissions/

Remembering the late Patrick Leigh Fermor in June 2011, Jan Morris commented: “Few of us want to be called travel writers nowadays, the genre having been cheapened and weakened.” An early career researcher in travel writing, this sentiment filled me with dread as I began my position as a lecturer at the University of South Australia. Indeed, travel writing courts controversy on many fronts, from the ethics of representation to the veracity of travel writers creating “mock ordeals” within their accounts. As Folker Hanusch and Elfriede Fürsich note though, it is precisely because of the significance of travel in modern society that travel writing is “such a fertile field for research” and worthy of continuing scholarly attention.
 
When I was given the chance to visit Professor Tim Youngs at the Centre for Travel Writing Studies in early 2016 it was an opportunity I accepted with trepidation: to be given the chance to spend time with someone so academically influential so early on in one’s career is daunting. Reading Tim’s work was one of the reasons I transitioned from being a professional travel writer to an academic in the first place. Despite my initial concerns, I had little to worry about.
 
There were many formal benefits to my visit to the CTWS at Nottingham Trent University: I talked about my work at a travel writing seminar at the Royal Concert Hall in Nottingham with Tim, I spoke to NTU students during an undergraduate lecture, I was introduced more thoroughly to the Studies in Travel Writing journal and I was able to give a presentation on my research on nocturnal travel writing at one of the fortnightly English Research Seminars hosted by NTU.
 
What was potentially more valuable however was the support and encouragement I received from CTWS members during my stay. It is often ignored in scholarly circles how worthwhile informal chats with like-minded academics can be. While travelling 16,000 kilometres for a coffee might seem extreme, it was more useful than I could have anticipated. Talking about travel and writing as it related to my career trajectory with Tim and Rebecca Butler over lunch, discussing blindness and travel with Dr Sarah Jackson over coffee, meeting with PhD students at the Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem, said to be the “oldest pub” in town, and talking about teaching travel writing with Dr Carl Thompson over tapas all gave me ideas for the future and the realisation that there is a vibrant and supportive travel writing research community at Nottingham Trent University.
 
Another reason I was keen to visit the CTWS was to present my research and discuss my latest book, After Dark: A Nocturnal Exploration of Madrid, which I was preparing for publication at the time.
 
My book is a work of travel writing. With this project I was looking to do something which addressed the representation of the ‘other’ in a more thoughtful manner than some of the contemporary travel accounts I had read, in this case through the perspective of people who live during the hours of darkness.
 
In 1762 Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote that we are blind half our lives because of what we miss at night. This simple statement struck a cord with me. If we writers, researchers and travellers are all blind half our lives because of what we miss during the night, what are the narratives and the perspectives on place that we’re missing out on?
 
This is where I saw an opportunity. Madrid is a fascinating place and it is underexplored from a travel writing point of view. Focusing on the capital of Spain allowed me to expand upon nocturnal travel writing in London and Paris from the 19th and 20th centuries in a modern setting.
 
My book was published by Signal Books internationally in October 2016.

Being at the CTWS after I had finished my immersion in Madrid gave me the chance to present my research, read the first samples of the book to a supportive audience and to have some quiet writing time to finish the manuscript.
 
Travel writing is as important and engaged as ever. It continues to cross even more boundaries than before as it becomes a political tool, a form which can dissolve literary borders and a meaningful site for “debates about mobility, location and belonging” (Lisle 2006).
 
I’m a travel writing optimist and I feel lucky to have a foot in both the academic and the professional worlds of the form. I hope that exploring these sorts of areas in thorough and engaging ways will enable travel writing to continue to have academic intrigue and popular credibility. Spending time at the CTWS allowed me to develop my relationship with the form and to build valuable contacts in the study of travel writing. I would love the opportunity to return to the CTWS in the future and I highly recommend the Centre to scholars and travel writers in the field.

Two-thirds creative and one-third critical, my dissertation consisted of excerpts from a non-fiction travel memoir set in the Himalayan Kingdom of Bhutan called The Dragon Run and an accompanying commentary that examined the representation of the self in modern travel writing. My supervisors explained from the outset that a kind of dialogue should take place in my study, the creative project generating themes that invited critical inquiry and the critical work guiding me in my creative decisions.
 
A dominant theme that emerged in my creative project was self-revelation. I wished to communicate the thoughts and feelings of my travelling alter-ego – as he flustered, for instance, over getting a teaching contract and a work visa to go to Bhutan, struggled to understand the political developments afoot upon arrival, or reflected at length on Gross National Happiness and on contentment more generally. By studying recent works of travel, in which the writers were expressive of the personal, I was able to draw on some of the literary techniques they deployed (Jamie Zeppa’s use of dramatic monologue, for example, to display the trepidation of her younger self at the prospect of teaching overseas, Edward Abbey’s tonal shifts to express irritation over the threat to wilderness as a result of industrial tourism, or Peter Matthiessen’s lyricism to articulate a perceived merging of self with mountain in the Nepali Himalaya). My practice also led to the study of critical theories that examined self-revelation in life writing: the ways that “devices of fiction,” such as dramatic scenes and rising action, invigorate the progress of the wayfarer toward fuller understanding, or the potential of nature at her wildest to nurture larger awareness. Theory fed back into practice. I had to decide how I would distinguish (through reflective asides) my more seasoned travelling self from his newly arrived counterpart. How self-searching could I be in my reminiscences without appearing self-absorbed or guilty of glorifying wilderness for the sake of self-realisation?
 
Though the doctoral journey is now at an end, the creative/critical dialogue prevails as I prepare my memoir for publication with the University of Alberta Press in Canada. My critical reading continues to guide my practice. I might, my editor suggests, further develop the persona of my travelling self by bringing to the fore the other principal characters in my memoir. On our long run across the Kingdom, my wife, for instance, became “camp mum,” taking our Bhutanese student runners under her wing, making sure they ate well, did their assigned chores, and attended to their injuries, while remaining in high spirits. Through reporting on the way she treated them (and on the ways they responded) and expressing my feelings, I will inevitably say much about who I am (or who I was at the time of the trip). Irritated by the presence of smoke-belching quarry trucks on the road to the final mountain pass, my running self seeks imaginative escape by remembering a striking nature encounter. Is his memory of the golden langur in the forest - endowed through recollection with the power to soothe the beleaguered traveller - somewhat contrived, my editor wonders ... Am I guilty here of fetishizing nature?