Donna Landry, Professor of English and American Literature at the University of Kent, and the Director of the Kent Centre for Studies in the Long Eighteenth Century.
A Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society, and the author, co-author, or co-editor of 6 books, she has published widely on eighteenth-century British literature and culture, postcolonial and feminist theory, and more recently on Anglo-Ottoman encounters. Her most recent book, Noble Brutes: How Eastern Horses Transformed English Culture, was published by The Johns Hopkins University Press in 2008.
With Gerald MacLean and Caroline Finkel, she is one of the organisers of a project of historical re-enactment, The Evliya Çelebi Ride and Way, which commenced in autumn 2009 with a horseback expedition to establish a sustainable tourism route in western Turkey. Following in the hoofprints of the great seventeenth-century Ottoman traveller Evliya Çelebi, the expedition and its outgrowths – a documentary film with the Istanbul company www.ajans21.com, a guidebook to the route, a scholarly collaborative volume, and a future ‘Evliya Çelebi Turkey and Syria Friendship Ride’ – are revealing hidden traces of rural worlds vanished, vanishing, and as yet unknown.