Andrea Kaston Tange (Professor of English at Eastern Michigan University and President, Midwest Modern Language Association)–organizer and panel chair– has a long publishing record on Victorian culture and empire and is in the final stages of writing a book on Victorian travel. Her most recent book project was a co-edited four-volume collection for Routledge Press on Children and Empire (2012); her first monograph received a CHOICE award as an outstanding book for 2010. She has been the Chair of the permanent session on Travel Writing for the MMLA for the past four years, and has both articles and numerous conference presentations that theorize Victorian travel writing in terms of identity, empire, and spectacle.

Samantha Burton (SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Art History, University of Southern California) brings the valuable perspective of an art historian to explore the value of images for shaping cultural memory. Her recent work—including a forthcoming article in the Journal of Canadian Art History, and a chapter in the 2013 collection Women, Bourgeois Femininity, and Public Space in Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture—focuses on Canadian travelers within the context of colonial claims to Britishness.

Lindsay Dearinger (Ph.D. candidate, Department of English, Louisiana State University) already has an impressive publication record, including two articles on Victorian Anglo-Jewish women and one forthcoming on performative gender identity. Her expertise on Anglo-Jewish writers and cultural history raises important questions of what the Victorians considered to be racial cultural memory–particularly important for considering the multiple, sometimes contradictory, voices that shape cultural memory.

Margaret Linley (Associate Professor of English and Print Culture Graduate Program Director, Simon Fraser University) is widely published in refereed journals and edited collections, with articles and chapters focusing on multiple aspects of travel in the nineteenth century. Her latest of these is an article, “The English Lake District and the Coming of the Railway,” in the peer-reviewed online resource BRANCH: Britain, Representation, and Nineteenth-Century History. Her command of travel writing as a field of study is perhaps best exemplified by her recent invitation to contribute the entry on “Travel Writing” to the Blackwell Encyclopedia of Victorian Literature.

Alex L. Milsom (Ph.D. candidate, Department of English, University of California-Los Angeles) intends to defend her dissertation, Joining the Tour: Guidebooks, Groups and Mediation in Nineteenth-Century British Travel, in Spring 2015. She has presented papers at the highly selective North American Victorian Studies Association and North American Society for the Study of Romanticism conferences. Her recent article, “The 19^th-Century Traveler and the 21^st-Century Scholar” raises precisely the questions of time and the afterlives of cultural memory that are at stake in the discussions for this panel.

Sarah Winter (Professor of English and Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies, University of Connecticut) has a distinguished publishing record—including a first book published with Stanfod UP and multiple articles in NOVEL—that brings together her interests in Victorian culture with her interests in human rights. Her most recent book, The Pleasures of Memory: Learning to Read with Charles Dickens (Fordham UP, 2011) provides crucial frameworks for the thinking about cultural memory that this panel intended to undertake.