Role
Tim Youngs is Professor Emeritus of English and Travel Studies. He continues to research and publish, deliver guest talks and conference papers, undertake peer review, and to collaborate with scholars internationally.
Career overview
After a Research Assistantship in Black British Drama at Loughborough University (1986-7), Professor Youngs has spent his career at Nottingham Trent, where he taught a wide range of literature courses, but with a concentration on US literature, especially African American writing, and on travel writing. He established and directed the Centre for Travel Writing Studies (2002-2022), and founded the journal Studies in Travel Writing, which he edited from 1997, moving to an advisory role in 2022.
Research areas
Tim Youngs specialises in the study of travel writing. His many authored or edited books include introductions to and overviews of the subject as well as advanced, in-depth studies. He is especially interested in African American travel writing and travel narratives of the interwar years. He co-edited with Peter Hulme the monograph series Routledge Research in Travel Writing and co-edits with Nandini Das the short-form monograph series Cambridge Elements: Travel Writing. His most recent books are The Cambridge History of Travel Writing, edited with Nandini Das, and The Ashgate Research Companion to Travel Writing, edited with Alasdair Pettinger (2019). He is currently completing Travel Writing: A Very Short Introduction for Oxford University Press.
Professor Youngs is also a poet. His poems have appeared in several magazines and he is the author of three pamphlets, Touching Distance (Five Leaves, 2017), Transmission Blues (Red Ceilings, 2022), and Managed Woodland (Red Ceilings, 2024). With Sarah Jackson he co-edited the anthology In Transit: Poems of Travel (The Emma Press, 2018).
For more information, please visit Professor Youngs’ personal website.
External activity
Professor Youngs has given keynote papers and other invited talks in more than 20 countries on five continents and has acted as external examiner for more than 30 PhDs for universities in the UK, Ireland, Australia, Sweden, Spain and Hungary. He is frequently called upon as a peer reviewer and has been a reader for over 30 academic journals and book publishers. He has also advised promotion committees for several universities, in Asia and the US as well as in the UK.
Sponsors and collaborators
Professor Youngs’ activities see him frequently collaborate with individuals and institutions in several countries. His research has been supported by the AHRC and the British Academy, among other funders. He has held visiting fellowships at the University of Tasmania, the Lilly Library, Indiana University; and the American Geographical Society/University of Wisconsin Milwaukee.
Publications
“British and North American Travel Writing and the Diary”, in The Diary: The Epic of Everyday Life, eds. Batsheva Ben-Amos and Dan Ben-Amos (Indiana University Press, 2020), pp.179-94.
“Travel”, in The Cambridge Companion to British Literature of the 1930s, ed. James B. Smith (Cambridge University Press, 2019), pp.145-59.
African American Travel Writing”, in Robert Clarke, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Travel Writing (Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp.109-23.
Take out your machine’: narratives of early motorcycle travel”, in Julia Kuehn and Paul Smethurst, eds, New Directions in Travel Writing Studies (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2015), pp.145-160.
Travel Writing: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies (ed. with Charles Forsdick), 4 vols (Routledge, 2012)
Beastly Journeys: Travel and Transformation at the fin de Siècle. Youngs T, 2013, Liverpool University Press
Underground Travels: Powers Hapgood and the Miners of the World. Youngs T, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 2013, 49 (4), 472
The Cambridge Introduction to Travel Writing (Cambridge Introductions). Youngs T, 2013, Cambridge University Press
Pushing Against the Black / White Limits of Maps: African American Writings of Travel. Youngs T, English Studies in Africa, 2010, 53 (2), 71-85
Travelling Modernists. Youngs T in (eds) Brooker P, Gasiorek A, Longworth D and Thacker A, The Oxford Handbook of Modernisms, 2010, Oxford University Press, 267-280
The Pacifist Traveller: Kate Crane-Gartz . Youngs T in (eds) Castillo S and Seed D, American Travel and Empire, 2009, Liverpool University Press, 200-216