France and Spain's Basque Region: A One-Week Stay at the Parador de Hondarribia

Originally from the UK, but having traveled extensively all over the world from an early age with his family, Cameron Watson is a writer, translator, copyeditor, and teacher. He went to graduate school in the United States and has a PhD in Basque Studies, with an emphasis in History. He taught Basque and Spanish history as well as that of modern Europe at the University of Nevada, Reno, and he has also been a visiting professor at several universities in Spain. He currently lives in the Basque Country, where he divides his time between freelance work in academic publishing and teaching on studies abroad programs for different US universities. He is the author of the definitive text in English on modern Basque history as well as several other books and articles. He speaks Spanish, Basque, and French and his interests include Basque history and culture and, more broadly, the complex issue of diverse Iberian identities through history. 

Kerri Lesh is an anthropologist with a PhD in Basque studies and an emphasis in Basque language and gastronomy. Specifically, she studies the minoritized Basque language and how it is used to market local gastronomic products. As such, she is one of only a handful of external scholars qualified to speak about this unique language. Kerri has lived in the Basque Country of Spain and returns there as much as she can to meet with both academics and local producers.

Kerri is also a Certified Specialist of Wine (CSW), having worked harvests in both Chile and the Basque Country. She is currently based in Kansas City, dividing her time between working as a Basque wine importer and teaching in the anthropology department at a local college. Kerri has taught courses in Basque culture, Indigenous and minoritized Languages, linguistic anthropology, and the anthropology of food and wine. She has published several articles in journals such as Anthropology of Food, Applied Linguistics Review, and BOGA: Basque Studies Consortium Journal.

Silvia Z. Mitchell is a historian of Renaissance and early modern European history, queenship, and Habsburg and royal court studies. Based on substantial archival research, Professor Mitchell’s work is written in a clear and accessible style to the general reader. She has published extensively on the reign of Carlos II of Spain (r. 1665-1700) and is an expert on his mother, Queen Mariana of Austria (1634 Vienna – 1696 Madrid), a critical figure in the history of Spain and Europe. Her book, Queen, Mother, and Stateswoman: Mariana of Austria and the Government of Spain (Penn State University, 2019, paperback 2020) is simultaneously a political biography of Queen Mariana of Austria and an analysis of the role of Spain in European international politics. The Spanish edition was published in a fully illustrated and extended edition (2023) by the Centro de Estudios de Europa Hispánica in their prestigious series The Habsburgs. She is currently preparing a history on “The Spanish Habsburgs, 1500-1700: The Men and the Women that Ruled the First Global Empire of the World” and a co-authored biography of the Spanish-born Queen of France, Marie-Thèrese of Austria (1638-1683), who has lived in the historical shadows of her famous husband, Louis XIV (r. 1643-1715). 

Born and raised in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Professor Mitchell completed all her academic training in the U.S., first at Florida International University and then at the University of Miami, where she was awarded her Ph.D. in 2013. She has been on the faculty of Purdue University in the Department of History since 2013, was promoted to Associated Professor in 2020, and was named University Faculty Scholar in 2022 in recognition of her accelerated path to academic distinction. She is a currently (2023-2024) a member of the group CINTER at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Madrid.

Professor Mitchell has been invited to lecture on her areas of expertise at recognized institutions such as the Prado Museum (Madrid), the Newberry Library (Chicago), the Central European University (Budapest), the Universidad Autónoma of Madrid, and the University of Vienna.

Jodi Campbell, professor emerita of Texas Christian University (TCU), earned her PhD in European history from the University of Minnesota and a Fulbright Fellowship to Spain. Her fascination with Spain comes from its rich diversity of past and present cultures—Celtic, Roman, Muslim, Castilian, Basque, Catalan—and how its history is preserved, interpreted, and disputed. She has walked across several hundred miles of Spain, following the medieval pilgrimage trails to Santiago. As a historian, she is interested in how ordinary people in the past understood and maintained their relationships and communities, and how we in the present choose to tell stories about the past. She has published several books and articles on Spanish history and culture, including At the First Table: Food and Social Identity in Early Modern Spain and Theater of Negotiation: Political Culture and Drama in Seventeenth-Century Madrid, and is co-editor of the new Routledge Handbook of the History of Madrid. Her academic honors include TCU Honors Professor of the Year in Teaching and the A.M. Pate, Jr. Research Professorship.

Recently retired from university teaching, Jodi now lives in Madrid and spends her time seeking out interesting new corners of Spain and burrowing into archives to sift through centuries-old documents and listen to the voices of the past.

Dr. Veronica Menaldi is a globetrotting Latina-American born of Argentine immigrants with a passion for bringing the past to life. She is a polyglot and an award-winning scholar and educator with a PhD in Hispanic literatures and cultures from the University of Minnesota, where she also earned funding from the Foreign Language and Area Studies fellowship and the Critical Language Scholarship program in Morocco, among others. Veronica is the vice president of the Societas Magica and the author of Love Magic and Control in Premodern Iberian Literature, in addition to numerous academic and public humanities articles. Her research focuses on socioreligious cultural contact originating from the Iberian Peninsula, examining cultural exchanges over the centuries through the lens of food and magic—from talismans to tarot. 

Having done research in/on Spain, Portugal, Morocco, France, Italy, and many countries in Latin America, and elsewhere, she has taught courses and given lectures on the rich histories, literatures, and cultures of Iberia, the Mediterranean, and the Atlantic to high schoolers, university students, scholars, and the general public.

Samuel Amago is William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Spanish at the University of Virginia (UVA), where he serves as chair of the Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese. He is a former chair of the Department of Romance Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and from 2003 to 2010 he taught at the University of Notre Dame. Together with colleagues at UVA, he is currently working to launch the Global Spanish Initiative, which aims to be a new paradigm of interdisciplinary research and creative collaboration that includes all places where Spanish is or has been spoken, across the Americas, Spain, the Philippines, North Africa, Equatorial Guinea, and beyond.

Sam teaches courses on modern and contemporary Spanish literary history, cinema, comics, and culture. His most recent book is Basura: Cultures of Waste in Contemporary Spain, which won the Modern Language Association’s Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize for outstanding book published in English or Spanish in the field of Latin American and Spanish literatures and cultures. 

He is a native of Madrid, Spain, and grew up in Pasadena, California.

Barbara J. Whitehead is the A. W. Crandall Professor of History at DePauw University and former chair of the history department. She earned her BA in history at Harvard University and her PhD from Bryn Mawr College. This educational background fostered a love of early modern Europe that has been the focus of her teaching and writing for over thirty years. At DePauw, Barbara has developed a broad spectrum of courses centered on European history ranging from the Viking Age and Crusades to the European witch hunts, the French Revolution, and the history of happiness. Her research in intellectual history has led to an edited volume on early modern women’s education and publications on forgotten figures of the 18th-century Enlightenment.

In addition to leading more than 15 academic tours of Europe, Barbara has served as the on-site director of the American Colleges of the Midwest Central European Studies Program in the Czech Republic, where she taught European history. She also taught in the Danish International Studies Program in Copenhagen as a visiting professor. In addition to living in the Czech Republic and Denmark, Barbara has also lived in Rome and Paris.

Beebe Bahrami is an award-winning writer and anthropologist who specializes in the intersecting worlds of European, Atlantic, and Mediterranean cultures from prehistory to the present. She earned her BA from the University of Colorado and her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania, where she trained in the four-field anthropological tradition of cultural, biological, archaeological, and linguistic anthropology.

Beebe continues to research and write about the past and present of the lands and peoples of southwestern France and northern Spain. Her work covers a wide range of topics, from prehistoric sites, landscapes, and caves, to those of the Neolithic, Bronze, and Iron ages, through antiquity and into the medieval and the modern era. Working with international teams, she has excavated and written about the Neanderthal sites of La Ferrassie, Pech de l’Azé, and Roc de Marsal. She also is an expert on the Camino de Santiago in France and Spain and has walked some 5,500 miles (8,850 kilometers) and counting, on these ancient routes, studying both the ancient pre-Christian landscapes, as well as the traditions, history, and lore that arose with the medieval pilgrimage.

Beebe has authored numerous books, including Café Oc: A Nomad's Tales of Magic, Mystery, and Finding Home in the Dordogne of Southwestern France; Café Neandertal: Excavating Our Past in One of Europe's Most Ancient Places; andThe Way of the Wild Goose: Three Pilgrimages Following Geese, Stars, and Hunches on the Camino de Santiago; as well as comprehensive travel guides such as Moon’s Camino de Santiago—Sacred Sites, Historic Villages, and Local Food & Wine.

Photo credit: Dennis Sandgathe