Exploring the Balkans Through Travel and Writing:
A Conversation with Professor Grace Fielder

Fall 2025

Watch the Full Interview

Before we dive into the highlights, we invite you to watch the full conversation between HSP Program Director Micah Lunsford and Professor Grace Fielder. In this engaging exchange, Professor Fielder discusses the inspiration behind her upcoming course, reflects on her lifelong connection to the Balkans, and explores how travel writing illuminates not only the cultures and landscapes encountered, but also the identities of both writer and reader.

Inspiration for the Course

Micah Lunsford: Grace, thank you for joining me to talk about your upcoming course. I’m really excited about Traveling and Writing the Balkans—it begins November 5th, both online and in person. What inspired you to design this course?

Grace Fielder: Thank you for inviting me, Micah. The Balkans have been at the heart of my professional and personal life for decades. I first began working in the region in the 1970s, and I’ve traveled there almost every year since—especially during the past twenty years. It’s where I’ve done my primary research, but it’s also simply a place I love being.

For much of my teaching career, my courses on the Balkans have focused on cultural and historical developments or on literature from the region. But over time, I became increasingly interested in travel writing—how outsiders describe the Balkans, and how those narratives both reveal and distort what they see. I read a great deal of travel literature myself, and I’ve always been intrigued by the question of how we “translate” another culture through our own imagination.

The Power of Travel Writing

Micah: That’s a fascinating perspective. What do you think makes travel writing such a rich source for understanding a place like the Balkans?

Grace: Travel writing tells two stories at once. It describes a landscape, a culture, a set of people—but it also reveals the traveler’s own mindset, their expectations, their assumptions. Especially in a region like the Balkans—where so many histories, languages, and religions overlap—travel writing exposes how people make sense of complexity.

For centuries, Western writers have portrayed the Balkans as exotic, mysterious, or “in between” East and West. Those descriptions tell us as much about the authors as they do about the region. By studying these texts, we can unpack the ways in which imagination, fascination, and misunderstanding often travel together. At the same time, contemporary writers from the Balkans have begun to reclaim those narratives, writing back with their own stories and perspectives. That dialogue between voices—between the observer and the observed—is what makes this material so powerful.

Seeing and Being Seen

Micah: It sounds like the course is as much about how we see as what we see.

Grace: Exactly. One of the great lessons of travel is humility. When we enter a new place, we bring our own histories with us—but we also encounter difference, surprise, and beauty that we couldn’t have anticipated. Travel writing captures that moment of encounter.

In the seminar, we’ll read both historical and modern travel accounts, from early European travelers who “discovered” the Balkans to writers who grappled with the region’s turbulent twentieth century. We’ll also discuss contemporary voices who explore what it means to belong, to cross borders, or to return home after displacement. Together, these writers invite us to think about travel as a form of inquiry, not conquest—a way of listening to the world.

Lessons and Takeaways

Micah: That’s beautifully said. What do you hope participants will take away from your course?

Grace: I hope they’ll leave with a richer sense of the Balkans as a living, breathing crossroads of culture—one that has inspired artists, thinkers, and travelers for centuries. But beyond that, I want them to think about their own experiences of travel and discovery. Even if we’re not boarding a plane, we travel every time we encounter a new idea, a new story, a new perspective.

The Humanities Seminars Program brings together people who are curious, open-minded, and eager to keep exploring. My goal is to help them see how travel writing can sharpen that curiosity. It teaches us to notice—to observe details, to question stereotypes, and to remain open to surprise. That’s what lifelong learning is all about.

An Invitation to Explore

Micah: I love that. HSP students often say our courses change the way they see the world—and this one seems like a perfect example.

Grace: I think so too. It’s an invitation to journey through words and imagination, guided by writers who have tried to capture the essence of a region that resists easy description. And along the way, we’ll ask what their journeys can teach us about our own.