Carol Reynolds

After a long career as a music-history professor at Southern Methodist University, Dallas, specializing in Russian and German Studies, Carol Reynolds now combines her insights on historical culture and the arts with her passion for education to create curricula empowering students and adults in their study of the Liberal Arts. Since 2011 she has spent significant time each year traveling for Smithsonian Journeys as an expert on tours across Europe and the Adriatic. She also works closely with her colleagues at Memoria Press, Classical Academic Press, and other publishers in the revival of Classical Education, speaking widely and contributing courses designed to teach history through the lens of the Fine Arts. Her publications include her signature program Discovering Music, Imperial Russia, Early Sacred Music, America’s Artistic Legacy, and A Child’s Treasure of Music. She just published a classic family songbook called Hurrah and Hallelujah. 

Tim Blanning

Tim Blanning is Professor Emeritus of Modern European History at the University of Cambridge. A Fellow of the British Academy since 1990, Tim has published extensively on the political and cultural history of Europe in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. Among his publications are The Culture of Power and the Power of Culture (2002), The Pursuit of Glory: Europe 1648-1815 (2007), The Triumph of Music (2008) and The Romantic Revolution (2010).  Tim's books have been translated into Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Hungarian, German, Polish, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Croatian and Arabic. His most recent book is a best-selling and prize-winning biography of Frederick the Great King of Prussia, published by Penguin/Random House. For his current project on the exciting if notorious Augustus ‘the Strong’ of Saxony and Poland he has expanded his area of expertise to include the Baltic countries and Eastern Europe.

Glenn Bugh

Glenn R. Bugh is associate professor of Classical Studies and Byzantine History at Virginia Tech.  He holds a PhD from the University of Maryland and has been a fellow at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens; the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton; the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, D.C.; and a research scholar at the Hellenic Institute for Byzantine and Post-Byzantine Studies in Venice, Italy. Professor Bugh served as the Summer Session Director of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens in 2000 and 2011, and was the Whitehead Visiting Professor at the American School in 2004-2005, where he offered a graduate seminar on “Venice and Greece.”  He has published numerous articles and two books entitled The Horsemen of Athens (Princeton University Press) and The Cambridge Companion to the Hellenistic World (Cambridge, 2006).  He also edited the revised edition of Kevin Andrews’ classic work, Castles of the Morea (Princeton, 2007).  He teaches courses on Greek language & culture and on Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Venetian, and Balkan history.  Professor Bugh has served as a lecturer on Smithsonian Journeys to Greece, Italy, the Adriatic, and the Black Sea since 1984 and has offered seven Smithsonian Associates seminars since 1998.  He served as Chairman of the Council of Member Institutions of the American Research Center in Sofia, Bulgaria from 2004-2014.  Professor Bugh has also been a frequent teaching faculty at Virginia Tech’s Charles Steger Center for International Scholarship in Riva San Vitale, Switzerland and in Spring 2014 at the University of Kent at Canterbury, UK.  He was the recipient of the Virginia Tech 2013 Alumni Award for Excellence in International Education, the highest award that the university gives in this area.

David Price Williams

David Price Williams has a degree in Ancient Near Eastern languages and Classical Greek and a doctorate in Near Eastern archaeology and has spent his working life as an East Mediterranean archaeologist. His first overseas field work was in 1969 as a surveyor at the classical site of Knidos in Turkey. He then worked for the Smithsonian Institution before directing his own field research in the same area through the 1970’s. David has designed and lectured on many cruises to Greece, Turkey and the Near East. He is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and an elected life member of the Society for Old Testament Studies.

Christopher Brennan

Christopher Brennan, guest researcher at the Austrian Academy of Sciences and lecturer at Masaryk University in Brno in the Czech Republic, is a historian specialized 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 south-western 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.

Dr. Brennan 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 authored chapters to several volumes on the collapse of Austria-Hungary and its aftermath, and is now working on a biography of Karl I. Returning to his first love (French History), he also plans to research Franco-Austrian relations before and after the Great War. He publishes in English, French and German.

Thomas Emmert

Thomas Emmert, professor emeritus at Gustavus Adolphus College, is a historian of Central and Eastern Europe with a research focus on the former Yugoslavia. Professor Emmert has also had visiting appointments at the University of Zagreb, the University of Minnesota, and Stanford University. He received his B.A. in history from St. Olaf College and his Ph.D. in Balkan and Russian history from Stanford University. A member of Phi Beta Kappa, he has been awarded research fellowships from the Fulbright Program, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research. His publications include Serbian Golgotha: Kosovo, 1389 (1990) and, most recently, The Scholars' Initiative: Confronting the Yugoslav Controversies (2009), a collaborative project of scholars from around the world dedicated to providing an objective analysis of what happened to Yugoslavia at the end of the 20th century. Professor Emmert has taught American undergraduates in semester programs in Zagreb and Berlin and has accompanied several educational trips to southeastern Europe.

Lawrence Butler

Dr. Butler received his BA and MA from Oberlin College and his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania.  Trained as an art historian of Medieval Europe, the Mediterranean and Islamic world, Butler’s teaching and scholarly interests now range across pre-modern Eurasia, including the Silk Road connections between the Mediterranean world and East Asia. While at George Mason University he served as director of the Art History program, and as Coordinator of the Ancient Mediterranean Art and Archaeology minor.

Dr. Butler has taught at GMU and Hiram College and has also held research positions at a number of museums. He was a Fulbright Research Fellow in Turkey in 1982-83. He has been an active participant in the Semester at Sea program, taking students on academic study tours around the world.  He was the visiting lecturer in Art History on the Fall 1999, Summer 2004, and Fall 2009 voyages.  On the Summer 2011 voyage, he was the Global Studies lecturer.

In 2004, Dr. Butler was awarded George Mason University’s Teaching Excellence Award and in 2005 he was elected to Phi Beta Delta, the honorary society for international education.  He lectures frequently for the Smithsonian Associates on the arts and cultural history of Spain and Portugal, Turkey, China, and many other places in between.