Keynote speakers

Lisa Bloom, the University of California, San Diego
Lisa Bloom is the author of Gender on Ice: American Ideologies of Polar Expeditions (University of Minnesota Press, 1993), which is the only critical book to date on the Arctic and Antarctica written from a feminist perspective, and an edited anthology entitled With Other Eyes: Looking at Race and Gender in Visual Culture (University of Minnesota Press, 1999). She recently completed a third book titled Jewish Identities in U.S. Feminist Art: Ghosts of Ethnicity (Routledge, 2006). Lisa Bloom is currently a Visiting Professor at the Department of Communication at the University of California, San Diego.

Wendy S. Mercer, University College London
Wendy S. Mercer is a Senior Lecturer in French at the University College London. Her publications include a book on Balzac, editions of works by Léonie d’Aunet, articles on various aspects of nineteenth-century French and comparative literature, especially the reception of German Romanticism in France, and nineteenth-century Arctic travel writing by Léonie d’Aunet and Xavier Marmier. A biography of Xavier Marmier has just been published: The Life and Travels of Xavier Marmier (1808-1892): Bringing World Literature to France (British Academy/Oxford University Press, 2007).

Professor Tim Youngs, Nottingham Trent University
Tim Youngs is Professor of English and Travel Studies, and Director of the Nottingham Trent Centre for Travel Writing Studies at Nottingham Trent University. His many publications on travel literature include Travellers in Africa: British Travelogues 1850–1900 (Manchester University Press/St. Martin’s Press, 1994). He is also co-editor (with Peter Hulme) of The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing (Cambridge University Press, 2002). In 1997, he founded the journal Studies in Travel Writing, which he is still editing.