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?

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Italy - as we know it - did not exist. The peninsula was divided into separate dynasties, most of which were under Austrian rule. Dissatisfaction with these dynastic regimes galvanised a movement towards Italy’s Risorgimento (1815-1861) or  political resurgence, culminating in the Proclamation of the Kingdom of Italy as an independent nation state on 17 March 1861.

Despite the prevailing gender ideology that politics was beyond their proper sphere, British middle-class women were conspicuous in their advocacy for the Risorgimento. In fact, Pamela Gerrish Nunn argues that Victorian women’s discourses surrounding the Italian question provide an index of their shifting role and representation in British society in the decades leading up to the suffragist campaigns.

Travel writing is an apposite genre through which to examine the extent of this discursive engagement. The greater accessibility of the Continent made it easier for upper and middle-class women to travel, albeit under male protection. If purportedly journeying in pursuit of health or cultural enlightenment, Victorian women also enjoyed unprecedented political authority as eye-witnesses to the Risorgimento. Many female tourists brought material in their luggage to supply General Garibaldi and his army with their famed “red shirts”. Small wonder that customs officers ransacked tourists’ suitcases “as if […] a Mazzini would be found hidden in every carpet-bag”, as one traveller August Ludwig von Rochau complained. A few women travellers even acted as political messengers for the revolutionary exile. More frequently (and more legitimately), however, female tourists acted as emissaries for the Risorgimento through their travel accounts.

It was with the particular aim of raising money for the revolutionary exile Ferdinando Gatteschi that Mary Shelley published her travel book Rambles in Germany and Italy […] (1844). Significantly, however, Shelley did not discuss her revolutionary fundraising efforts with her publisher Edward Moxon. Instead, she pitched Rambles in conventionally feminine terms as “light” and “amusing”, avoiding mention of politics. Although often transgressed in actuality, the Victorian middle-class gender ideology of separate spheres nonetheless affected the critical reception of women’s travel writing, impacting on women's political engagement in print.

The etymology of the word Risorgimento, which means a resurgence, rebirth or resurrection, lent itself well to feminine mythologies of the movement. The allegorical representation of Italy as Italia – a woman in chains – further accommodated proto-feminist interpretations of Italian nationalism. One book in particular, Madame de Staël’s Corinne, ou Italie (1807), solidified the imaginative association of Italy with a woman’s country, as a space where women could (paradoxically) enjoy greater freedoms than at home. A bestseller into the 1870s, Corinne offered a flattering model for later women travel writers to adapt by imagining Italy as the home of female creative genius. Declared “[T]he image of our beautiful Italy”, the eponymous heroine also provided a modern allegory for Italy’s political situation, imbricating the woman question with the Italian question.

Women travel writers typically approached the Italian question through domestic discourses. Some – like Shelley – emphasised women’s role in the rebirth of the young nation as civic mothers. This strategy was also used by Mazzini to rally Englishwomen in support of the cause. Others, such as Florence Nightingale, framed their political inquiries as spiritual pilgrimages with Italy’s moral regeneration or resurrection at the bourn. However, as the Risorgimento took a violent turn with the 1848 revolutions, it became more difficult to accommodate Italian politics to conventionally feminine discourses. Accordingly, the didactic travel writer Selina Bunbury asserted her literary authority against Italian revolutionism. Others like Margaret Dunbar grew strangely quiet about the Italian question, focussing instead on a picturesque Italy, sanitized of revolutionary violence.

The relationship between the campaign for female suffrage and Italian independence was therefore much more complicated than the Corinne myth might suggest. Victorian women’s Italianate travel writing may provide an index of their changing role in British society. However, it also evidences women writers’ strategic engagement with the Risorgimento according to its shifting political capital in Britain. Rather than propelling a mutually reinforcing, proto-feminist narrative of women’s liberal engagement with the Risorgimento, Victorian women's travel accounts more often reveal these two campaigns as competing sites of authority.

We welcome applications from prospective students wishing to pursue a PhD on travel writing under the guidance of a supervision team led by Professor Tim Youngs at the Centre for Travel Writing Studies.

There is no restriction as to historical or geographical focus or type of critical approach, but proposals relating to post-medieval travel writing and any of the following areas may be especially welcome: North America; Italy; India; travel writing and modes of transport; the poetry of travel; modernism and travel; postcolonialism and travel; creative-critical work; radical travel writing; diasporic travel narratives; travel writing and the Midlands. We also welcome single-author studies, particularly of unjustly neglected figures.

The studentship covers the cost of fees at home/EU rates and includes an annual stipend in line with AHRC bursary rates (£14296) for 3 years.
The successful applicant will be expected to support the Centre’s activities.

Closing Date:  5pm on Monday, 29 August 2016. 

For full details on how to apply, visit:
http://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/AOF957/professor-tim-youngs-the-literature-of-travel/

The School of Arts and Humanities seeks to appoint a Permanent Lecturer in English from 1 October 2016. The post affords an opportunity to join the Centre for Travel Writing Studies, as travel writing is one of the areas of interest. Candidates are sought with specialisms in two or more of the following: Travel writing, Romantic literature and Gothic literature. A broad knowledge and understanding of the major subject areas within English Studies is also required.

Closing date: 5pm on Sunday, 14 August 2016.

For full details on how to apply, visit:
https://vacancies.ntu.ac.uk/displayjob.aspx?jobid=3046

Opportunity for a fully funded PhD studentship in the Literature of Travel at the Centre for Travel Writing Studies as part of the NTU Vice-Chancellor's Researcher Development Scheme.

We welcome applications from prospective PhD students wishing to work on a travel writing project under the guidance of a supervision team led by Professor Tim Youngs. There is no restriction as to historical or geographical focus or critical approach, but proposals relating to any of the following areas may be especially welcome: North America; Italy; India; travel writing and modes of transport; the poetry of travel; modernism and travel; postcolonialism and travel; creative-critical work; radical travel writing; diasporic travel narratives; travel writing and the Midlands. We also welcome single-author studies, particularly of unjustly neglected figures. The successful applicant will be expected to support CTWS activities.

Exceptional candidates will have the chance to follow up their PhDs with a one year position at NTU as a full-time Postdoctoral Research Associate.

Deadline for Applications: 5pm on Sunday, 5 June 2016

For details on how to apply visit: http://tinyurl.com/zhg2laf