Faculty Lecturers

Peter A. Coclanis is Albert R. Newsome Distinguished Professor of History and Director of the Global Research Institute at UNC-Chapel Hill.   He is a native of Chicago and took his Ph.D. at Columbia University in 1984, joining the History Department at UNC that same year.  He is a specialist in the field of economic history and has published extensively in that area.  He was formerly Chair of the History Department at UNC and from 2003 through 2009 Associate Provost for International Affairs.  In addition to teaching at UNC, he has held visiting appointments at Columbia, Harvard, and the National University of Singapore.  Over the years he has lectured on a number of GAA tours, including trips to Spain, Russia, the Baltic, Southeast Asia, and China.    He is the proud father of two UNC grads.

Peter will serve as enrichment lecturer on Greece ~ Athens & Kalamata, Sept. 20 – 29, 2024 with a minimum of 10 UNC travelers.

A Professor of Comparative Literature, Marsha S. Collins specializes in the literature of Early Modern Europe, especially the Literature of Early Modern Spain in its European context. Her research focuses on romance and other idealizing fictional forms, literature and the visual arts, early modern lyric poetry, and Early Modern European court culture. She has written on romance, pastoral, ekphrasis, and early modern subjectivity, among other topics, as well as on authors such as Cervantes, Unamuno, Galdós, Góngora, Lope, and others.  She is currently writing a book with the title “Novel Friendships: Amity and Community in Cervantes’s Don Quijote.”

Marsha will serve as enrichment lecturer on Spain ~ Andalucia in a Parador, May 16 – 24, 2024, with a minimum of 10 UNC travelers.

Ritchie Kendall is an Emeritus Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature who retired in 2019 after thirty-nine years of teaching, research and administration at Carolina.  He headed up both the undergraduate and graduate literature programs before spending fifteen years as Assistant Dean for Honors Carolina.  He was awarded the Tanner Prize for excellence in undergraduate teaching and led the inaugural year of the Honors Semester Abroad in London program, subsequently spending three more semesters as Faculty Director of that program. He continues to conduct research recently publishing two essays on how Shakespeare and his contemporaries represented new forms of economic activity to their popular audiences.  This is part of a larger project stretching from the Renaissance stage to contemporary cinema on how story-telling helps cultures come to terms with exciting but disruptive economic innovation and change.

Ritchie will serve as an enrichment lecturer on Journey through Britain, Aug. 24 – Sept. 6, 2024, with a minimum of 15 UNC travelers.

Donald J. Raleigh is the Jay Richard Judson Distinguished Professor of History Emeritus at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.  He has authored, translated, and edited numerous books on modern Russian history including Revolution on the Volga (1986), Experiencing Russia’s Civil War (2002), Russia’s Sputnik Generation (2006), and Soviet Baby Boomers (2012), a Russian-language edition of which was published in 2015.

The book was short listed for the Pushkin House Prize in Great Britain and won the Southern Conference on Slavic Studies Book Prize.  His current research project, a biography of Soviet leader Leonid Ilich Brezhnev, has taken him to archives in Ukraine, Moldova, Kazakhstan, and Russia.  Raleigh joined the faculty at UNC in 1988.  Since then, he has supervised 33 MA theses and 26 PhD dissertations, and has served on dozens of other thesis and dissertation committees.  In 2002 he received the Distinguished Teaching Award for Post-Baccalaureate Instruction; in 2016 the Faculty Award for Excellence in Doctoral Mentoring; and in 2020 the UNC Women’s Leadership Council Graduate Mentoring Award.  In the fall of 2021, the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies awarded him its  Distinguished Contributions to Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies Award.

Don will serve as enrichment lecturer on Croatia & Cruising the Dalmatian Coast, May 14 – 25, 2024, with a minimum of 10 UNC travelers.

Kevin Stewart is an Associate Professor in the Department of Earth, Marine and Environmental Sciences at UNC- Chapel Hill. He received his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley and his research is focused on the evolution of mountain belts, including the Rocky Mountains of Montana and Wyoming, the Apennines of Italy, and the Appalachians. Stewart’s research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Petroleum Research Fund of the American Chemical Society, and the U.S. Geological Survey. He has won the James M. Johnston Teaching Excellence Award, the Tanner Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, a Chapman Fellowship for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, the UNC Board of Governors Award for Excellence in Teaching, and the Walter H. Wheeler Award for Excellence in Teaching.  He is also the co-author of Exploring the Geology of the Carolinas from UNC Press. He has served as UNC enrichment lecturer on previous alumni tours to Alaska, Iceland, Norway, the Galapagos, and national parks of the western United States.

Kevin will serve as enrichment lecturer on Swiss Alps & Italian Lakes, July 17 – 26, 2024, with a minimum of 10 UNC travelers.