Professor Jim Watt and Dr Alison O'Byrne publish new essay collection

Posted on 19 May 2025

Warm congratulations to Jim Watt and Alison O'Byrne on the publication of their collection of essays, Discovering Britain and Ireland in the Romantic Period: Grand Tours.

Co-editors Watt and O'Byrne have brought together an exciting, interdisciplinary collection of essays on the topics of travel, national identity, and the grand tour. Even as members of the social elite participated in the European Grand Tour, travellers, writers, and readers increasingly recognized that Britain and Ireland might offer sights and experiences to rival the continent. This collection examines the practice and representation of tourism on 'home' ground during the period when modern Britain was invented and became a powerful and prosperous imperial nation. Interdisciplinary essays explore the diverse variety of tours and tourist agendas – artistic, industrial, leisure, scientific – and they address the ways in which travellers' 'discovery' of Britain and Ireland was an active and often self-critical process that potentially encompassed encounters with the alien and unfamiliar. Considering travellers from the wider world as well as from within Britain and Ireland, contributors discuss the function of comparative reference in contemporary travel-writing, as tourists often thought with and through others as they reflected on the distinctiveness and significance of the sites that they visited.

The collection features chapters by CECS staff member, Professor Jon Mee, CECS co-founder, Professor Emerita Harriet Guest, and former CECS PhD Dr Elizabeth Edwards.