Christmas Markets along the Danube: A River Cruise from Nuremberg to Budapest

Christopher Brennan, guest researcher at the Austrian Academy of Sciences and lecturer at Masaryk University in Brno in the Czech Republic, is a historian who specializes in Central and Eastern Europe with a particular interest in the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Holy Roman Empire, Germany, and the history of the Czechs. Though British, he grew up in southwestern France. He obtained a BA in Modern Languages (German and Russian, plus Czech) at the University of Bristol and a master’s in Slavonic Studies from Oriel College at the University of Oxford.

Chris studied for a PhD at the London School of Economics on the subject of the disintegration of the Habsburg Empire and the degree of responsibility of its last monarch, Emperor Karl I. He taught undergraduates there for four years, with a one-year hiatus in Paris lecturing American undergraduates on French history and on the history of Eastern European communism. He has written on the memory of World War I and of the Habsburg Dynasty, on the Balkan Wars, on the author Joseph Roth, and on interwar Austria. He has also authored chapters for several volumes on the collapse of Austria-Hungary and its aftermath, and is now working on a biography of Karl I. 

After a long career as professor of musical history at Southern Methodist University (SMU) in Dallas, Dr. Carol Reynolds continues to design fine arts curricula and advocate for art education, weaving history, humor, and energy into everything she does. Her research interests include German Romanticism and the musical court of Frederick the Great, and she has lived and taught in Germany many times since 1981.  She founded and directed SMU’s  Study-in-Germany program and is fluent in German and Russian.

Carol’s unprecedented textbook Discovering Music: 300 Years of Interaction in Western Music, Arts, History, and Culture (2009) has reached students across the world, and in 2011 she released a cross-discipline course called Exploring America’s Musical Heritage. Her other publications include Early Sacred Music and a classic family songbook called Hurrah and Hallelujah. 

A popular speaker and a passionate traveler, Carol gives lectures at educational conferences and arts institutions across the U.S., and is a popular expert on Smithsonian Journeys to Central and Eastern Europe.  She and her husband Hank now live in North Carolina and maintain a home in Weimar—the home of J.S. Bach, Liszt, Goethe, and Schiller.

Karl Eikenberry is a Distinguished Fellow at the Stimson Center; senior advisor to the United States Institute of Peace; and Johnson & Johnson visiting faculty chair in leadership at Schwarzman College, a global affairs master’s program at China’s Tsinghua University. His almost four decades of national service culminated with his appointment as U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan from 2009 until 2011.  Before serving as chief of mission in Kabul, Karl had a 35-year career in the United States Army, retiring in 2009 with the rank of lieutenant general. 

Karl’s military operational posts included commander and staff officer with mechanized, light, airborne, and ranger infantry units in the continental U.S., Hawaii, Korea, and Italy; and in Afghanistan as the commander of the American-led coalition forces. He held various policy and political-military positions ranging from deputy chairman of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Military Committee in Brussels, Belgium; Director for Strategic Planning and Policy for U.S. Pacific Command at Camp Smith, Hawaii; U.S. security coordinator and chief of the Office of Military Cooperation in Kabul; senior country director for China and Taiwan for the Office of the Secretary of Defense; and assistant Army and later defense attaché at the U.S. embassy in Beijing, China.

After his diplomatic and military career, Karl taught at Stanford University and later advised on Saudi Arabia defense transformation planning while living in Riyadh. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; serves on the boards of the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue, National Committee on American Foreign Policy, and American Councils for International Education; and is the recipient of the United States Military Academy Distinguished Graduate Award and Harvard University Centennial Medal.

Laurie Koloski traveled to Poland for the first time in 1981, knowing little about the country and maybe a dozen words of the language. It didn’t take long to realize what a special place it was, and she lived there for four years before returning to the U.S. to complete her undergraduate studies. She has been traveling to and studying Central and Eastern Europe ever since.

Recently retired from William & Mary’s Department of History, Laurie received degrees from the University of Michigan, Yale University, and Stanford University, as well as certificates from the Center for Polish Language and Culture in the World at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland. While her training and research focused on social and cultural history in communist-era Poland, her teaching interests have encompassed modern European and global history, communism and socialism, historical interpretation, and material culture. Her favorite course at W&M was Stuff: Objects and Their (Hi)Stories, in which she worked with first-year students to read material objects and critically evaluate the past and present-day stories of their favorite (and sometimes least favorite) things.

Laurie uses case studies to highlight key historical themes and lessons, often by focusing on the ways that things such as monuments, maps, food, buildings, and even mustaches can help us understand broad developments such as identity, imperial power, and ideology. She has enjoyed traveling with Smithsonian Journeys tours since 2016 and is always eager to meander back streets with her fellow travelers, looking for that little café, shop, or street sign that has a larger story to tell.

Tim Richardson is a leading historian of gardens, art, architecture, and food and the author of more than 25 acclaimed books, including Great Gardens of America, The English Landscape Garden, and Sweets: A History of Candy. After studying English literature at Oxford, Tim began his career at Country Life magazine, where he became the gardens editor and theater critic for 23 years. He went on to write for a wide range of publications, as a long-time columnist for the Daily Telegraph, landscape editor for Wallpaper,* and contributor to Literary Review and the Financial Times. He is currently art critic at The Idler magazine.   

Tim is known for his witty and sometimes irreverent style; a collection of his garden journalism was entitled You Should Have Been Here Last Week, because, he says, that is what garden owners always seem to say. This mischievous spirit led him to found the Chelsea Fringe Festival in 2012—as an adjunct to the famous Chelsea Flower Show but with an emphasis on community gardening and artistic happenings. It has been the platform for more than 2,500 events in some 22 countries. Tim volunteers as an advisor to the National Trust in the United Kingdom and works as a consultant on historic gardens and houses.  

As a visiting professor at Vienna University for several years, Tim taught landscape art—and enjoyed the cafes and cakes! He now teaches a master’s course in landscape history at London University; and wrote an online course on the topic that is taught at Oxford University's continuing education department. Tim lives in London and Devon with his wife, Claire, and enjoys competing in the sport of fencing. 

Dr. Paul B. Sturtevant has been enthralled with the Middle Ages since he began building balsa wood castles for his toy knights when he was eight years old. Fast-forwarding just a little, he has now become an expert on the contemporary public’s understanding of the Middle Ages. In the intervening years, after a brief career as an actor, he moved to the United Kingdom where he earned his master’s and his Ph.D. from the Universities of York and Leeds, respectively. He then taught for universities in the United Kingdom, the U.S., and Portugal on subjects as diverse as medieval history, film theory, and museum studies.

Paul has published widely on the intersection of contemporary issues and the medieval past both in academic books and also public venues like the Washington Post and BBC News. He is particularly fond of two of his stories, one in which he successfully debunked a pernicious ghost story about one of his ancestors, and another on the history of American barbecue. He founded and ran an award-winning medieval history online magazine called The Public Medievalist, and worked for a decade for the Smithsonian Institution as an audience research specialist. Paul now lives with his partner in Portugal, where they are developing cutting-edge, historical study abroad-style experiences for visitors to Europe.

Dr. Tiffany Nicole Florvil is an associate professor of modern European history and the history of women, gender, and sexuality at the University of New Mexico. She has taught undergraduate and graduate courses on Central Europe (especially Germany and Austria), 19th- and 20th- century Europe, Black Europe, transnationalism, global social movements, and international human rights. In the early 1990s, she began writing her German pen pal, which sparked her fascination with the country. After high school, she spent an exchange year in Hamburg. She then pursued both history and German literature and language as her undergraduate majors and continued graduate work in history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of South Carolina.

Tiffany has published numerous articles and books, including Mobilizing Black Germany: Afro-German Women and the Making of a Transnational Movement, which received several awards, and its German translation Black Germany: Schwarz, Deutsch, feministisch – die Geschichte einer Bewegung. Her work has been funded by the Harvard Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the American Academy in Berlin, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), and others. With her writing and her community outreach, she makes her scholarship accessible to diverse public audiences.

Sharon Hudgins is an award-winning author, a former university professor, and a professional journalist and speaker. A seasoned traveler with a sense of adventure, she has lived in 10 countries on three continents, traveled through 60 countries across the globe, and logged more than 45,000 miles on the Trans-Siberian Railroad. After completing a bachelor's degree in government at the University of Texas, she earned graduate degrees at the University of Michigan (political science and strategic studies) and the University of Texas (radio, television, and film). She has taught at several major universities, including 18 years for the University of Maryland's education programs in Germany, Spain, Greece, Japan, Korea, and Russia.

Sharon is the author of five nonfiction books and editor of several others, including Food on the Move: Dining on the Legendary Railway Journeys of the World and a cookbook about the regional cuisines of Spain. As a journalist and independent scholar, she has published more than 1,000 articles on history, travel, culture, and food, in magazines, newspapers, academic journals, and books, including several entries in Oxford encyclopedias. Since 2006 she has also been a lecturer on more than 50 tours to eastern and western Europe, Alaska, Japan, and Russia, including expedition cruises to the North Pacific. She enjoys lecturing on subjects as diverse as European history, cuisines, and holidays; native people of the circumpolar north; and the life and lore of reindeer.

Dr. Amanda Luyster is a distinguished medieval art historian and professor at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. Her work offers new perspectives on the cross-cultural nature of medieval visual culture, specifically the interactions between western Europe and the Islamic and Byzantine worlds and the movement of silk across broad global networks. 

After graduating from Amherst College summa cum laude and receiving her PhD from Harvard in 2003, she has gone on to secure prestigious fellowships and grants, including support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Paul Mellon Centre, the American Philosophical Society, and the Samuel H. Kress Foundation. She has been invited to speak at Harvard University, Cambridge University, the University of Oxford, London’s Institute of Historical Research, Yale University’s Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, and other locations from Boston to China. Her work has led to international recognition, including election as a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries (FSA) in London and the Medieval Academy of America’s 2024 Monica H. Green Prize for Distinguished Medieval Research. 

Amanda is also dedicated to public-facing scholarship and media outreach. Her research has been featured in the London-based newspaper The Independent, The Times of Israel, and Harvard Magazine, and she has been interviewed on widely followed podcasts such as Gone Medieval (History Hit).  She has lived and worked in multiple European countries and loves travel and photography.