Wendy Bracewell is Professor of Southeast European History at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, where she has worked since receiving her PhD at Stanford University in 1986. She is a historian whose scholarly interests focus on cultures in contact. She has published on topics ranging from the early modern Adriatic borderlands (e.g.The Uskoks of Senj: Piracy, Banditry and Holy War in the Sixteenth-Century Adriatic, Cornell University Press, 1992), to travel writing and European identities (including as editor of the series East Looks West: East European Travel Writing on Europe, 1550-2000, vols. 1-3, CEU Press, 2008-09). Currently she is working on a monograph on East European 'travel polemics' and the Republic of Letters.This talk is co-sponsored by the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, the Department of History, and the University Lecture Series.