Michelle Smith
joined the CHB in 2008 as a Postdoctoral Fellow funded
by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council
of Canada. Her research project began with one not-so-simple
question: why does travel matter?
The question
was prompted by her doctoral work on Canadian women's
mass-market magazines of the 1930s and 1940s, a time
and a medium in which women were typically portrayed
as figures happily ensconced in domesticity. There were,
however, fissures in this portrayal, and travel was
elemental to these fissures. Fictional treatments of
travel ranged from tales of courageous female immigrants
to stories of European "grand tours” undertaken
by women of independent means; non-fiction articles
on women travelers tended to link global mobility to
the activities of professional writing, business entrepreneurship,
or humanitarian aid.
Curious about
the relationships among women, travel, and text, Michelle
designed the project “That Anyone Could Do Anything:
Contemporary Women Travel Writers” to be not only an
exploration of why travel matters, but also a study
of how travel narratives come into being. The project
focuses on the works of Robyn Davidson, Dervla Murphy,
and Mary Morris, and it examines the transmission of
women's travel narratives through different media (newspapers,
periodicals, individual books), the conditions of authorship
for female travel writers, and the treatment of the
history, place, and culture as these facets of travel
are taken up in the narratives themselves.
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