The papers on this panel (remember, you can find the full texts of all of them, with illustrations, here) brought up a whole series of fascinating, interconnected issues:

• How do travelers think about their personal and national identities, and to what degree are these tied to particular places as opposed to displaying particular kinds of bodies or marked identity categories?
• How do the problems of nostalgia shape the experience of travelers?
• How do travel writers define the picturesque, and what are the costs/consequences of seeking it as one travels?
• What is the relationship between the desire to fix/memorialize/preserve a place (through exploring it, writing definitive guides to it, or demarcating it as “protected” land, for example) and the fact that tourism itself is often seen as interfering with the authenticity of the original place? How possible is it to travel and to conserve simultaneously? What are the costs of both efforts, and how do travelers–whether skillfully or not–negotiate those competing impulses?

There are many more topics we could fruitfully discuss. I hope that people who attended might add questions, comments, observations here in the comments, or bring up other issues that we should discuss. And I hope the panelists themselves will keep the conversation going, as we think about intersections between their work.