Across Northern Spain and Portugal: Lisbon to Barcelona

Ellen Lokos is a university professor, actor, director, and speaker. As Associate Professor of Spanish and Latin American Literature at Harvard, she taught a wide range of topics including the literature of the Early Modern period, contemporary women’s fiction, and the post-war novel in Spain. While at Harvard, she published a groundbreaking book, The Solitary Journey: Cervantes’s Voyage to Parnassus; was a frequent speaker at international conferences; and received numerous teaching awards from the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning. Ellen has also taught at Bentley University, Boston University, Clark University, and, most recently, at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA. In addition to her teaching duties, she co-directed a bilingual theater troupe that produced original plays. Ellen created an innovative, month-long college course based in Madrid, leading students on trips throughout Spain as they studied Spanish culture and identity in depth.

In the early years of her career, Ellen resided in Madrid and worked on a television news-magazine show. Her responsibilities included translation and interpretation while conducting live, on-camera interviews of politicians, celebrities, and newsmakers. Ellen is a seasoned global traveler and is passionate about sharing her enthusiasm for cultural exploration with others.

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. 

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.

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

Dr. Lawrence Butler is an art historian whose teaching and scholarly interests range from medieval Europe and the Islamic world across pre-modern Eurasia—including the Silk Road connections between the Mediterranean world and East Asia. While teaching at George Mason University, Larry served as director of the art history program and as coordinator of the Ancient Mediterranean Art and Archaeology minor. 

Larry received his BA and MA from Oberlin College and his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. He was a Fulbright Research Fellow in Turkey in 1982-83, and has been an active participant in the Semester at Sea program, taking students on academic study tours around the world. He also taught at Hiram College and held research positions at a number of museums.

In 2004, Larry 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.

Francisco García-Serrano earned his M.A and Ph.D. in Medieval Iberian History at the University of California, Berkeley and is currently a professor of History in the Department of Humanities at Saint Louis University, Madrid Campus.  In addition, he has been a visiting professor at U.C. Berkeley, New York University in Madrid, and Sophia University in Tokyo, Japan.

His research focuses on the influence of the Mendicant Orders in Spain during the late Middle Ages and on religious identity and interfaith relations. Francisco García-Serrano has published Preachers of the City. The Expansion of the Dominican Order in Castile, 1217-1348 (University Press of the South, 1997), and his most recent contributions to collective books include “Del convento al palacio: los frailes y las oligarquías castellanas (siglos XIII-XIV)”, in Isabel Beceiro Pita, dir., Poder, piedad y devoción. Castilla y su entorno (siglos XII-XV) (Silex, Madrid, 2014), and “The Mendicants as a Mediterranean Phenomenon,” in Taryn Chubb and Emily Kelly, ed., Mendicants and Merchants in the Medieval Mediterranean (Brill, 2013). His current book project, The Friars and Their Impact in Medieval Iberia, contains the collaboration of fifteen international specialists.

Professor García-Serrano also serves as the Director of Ibero-American Studies at Saint Louis University, Madrid Campus, an academic program that he created. In addition he is the current president of the interdisciplinary association AHLiST (2012-2015) and has organized a number of international conferences.

Kerri Lesh is a cultural and linguistic anthropologist who has lived in various parts of Spain over the course of her academic career. She received her PhD from the University of Nevada, Reno, having conducted research on minoritized languages, tourism, and gastronomy. Her particular interest focuses on how culture and language intersect with gastronomy. She returns to Spain as much as she can to meet with both academics and local food and wine producers. Kerri has fond memories of having completed a portion of the Camino de Santiago, marveling at the wonders of the Alhambra, wandering through Barcelona’s Gothic Quarter, and walking among the vineyards in the verdant coastal regions of the Basque Country and Galicia. She is at her happiest when eating and drinking and talking about eating and drinking.

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 at a local vineyard, teaching for the Culinary Center of Kansas City, 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.