LAURENCE WILLIAMS

My research explores the interactions between travel writing and British literature in the long eighteenth century, focusing on narratives of China, Japan, and the Ottoman Empire. More recently, I have been working on nineteenth-century "globe-trotter" travel writing, particularly narratives written in the decades after the opening of Japan in the 1850s.

I'm currently co-editing a volume on Pacific travel writing, "Pacific Gateways", with Tomoe Kumojima. I co-edited (with Alex Watson) a collection of essays on "British Romanticism in Asia" (Palgrave, 2019), and (with Steve Clark) a Studies in Travel Writing special issue on "Isabella Bird, Victorian Women's Travel Writing, and Japan" (2017).