NATJA - North American Travel Journalists Association

Peter I. Rose

Biography

Peter Rose is a sociologist, free-lance writer, photographer, and inveterate traveler with two bases in Massachusetts: Northampton and Wellfleet. Like the character in one of Robert Frost's best known poems, he has always tried to combine his avocation with his vocation as his "two eyes make one in sight." He has been teaching sociology and American Studies and writing about both, and about the fads and foibles of human life for nearly 50 years. At present he is Sophia Smith Professor Emeritus at Smith College and a member of the Graduate Faculty of the University of Massachusetts. He is also chair of the International Advisory Board of University College Utrecht and of the Roosevelt Academy, both honors colleges of Utrecht University in The Netherlands; a fellow and frequent faculty member of the Salzburg Seminar in Austria, and a member of the Board of Trustees of the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies in Portland, Maine.

Born and raised in upstate New York, he received his A.B. from Syracuse University in 1954 and his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1959. He has called Massachusetts home since 1960, but has spent extensive periods of time away from his base serving as a visiting professor at Clark, Colorado, Wesleyan, UCLA, Yale and Harvard, a visiting scholar the East-West Center in Hawaii, Stanford, Oxford, study centers in Bellagio and Bogliasco in Italy, and at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in the PRC. A frequent lecturer in the Netherlands, he was awarded the Univesity Medal by the University of Amsterdam in 1994. Other overseas assignments include Fulbright professorships in the United Kingdom, Japan, Australia and Austria. He has visited and lectured in more than 40 other countries, and often written about various aspects of their cultures and character(s).

Credits

Peter Rose's travel writing is broad-based, ranging from stories about his life as a peripatetic professor and his extracurricular sojourns to profiles of (ad)venture capitalists, sea captains and tour guides to descriptions of "social climbing" in the Alps, skiing in Vermont, and windjamming on the coast of Maine and on the Mediterranean; from the experiences of Indochinese refugees moving from Southeast Asia to the United States to commentaries on political changes in Northern Ireland to word-portraits of ordinary tourists and his conversion in the desert (where he became a devotee of the spa experience). He has published travel essays in the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Christian Science Monitor, the Daily Hampshire Gazette, and other papers, and in the "pages" of the web-magazines, SoGoNow and

MSNBC-affiliated Travelworld International. In 2005, he received the NATJA "Award of Excellence for the Best Travel Article Written for the Internet" for 2004 for his cover essay "Chianti Classico" published in TWI.

A frequent contributor to national newspapers, magazines,and academic journsls, in addition to his recent memoir, "Guest Appearances and Other Travels in Time and Space" (Swallow Press, 2003), Peter Rose is the author of "They and We" (Random House, 1963, Paradigm Publishers, 6th ed. 2006), "The Subject is Race" (Oxford University Press, 1967), "Strangers in Their Midst" (Richwood Press, 1977), "Mainstream and Margins" (Transaction Press, 1983), and "Tempest-Tost" (Oxford University Press, 1997). He is also editor of a number of books on society, culture, race, immigration, and the dilemmas of diversity, most recently, "The Dispossessed: An Anatomy of Exile" (University of Massachusetts Press, 2005). A former consulting editor for Random House-Knopf and for Time-Life Books, he has long been a regular book reviewer for the Christian Science Monitor, New York Newsday, and Congress Monthly, and an occasional columnist for the Daily Hampshire Gazette's "Hampshire Life Magazine".

Affiliations

He is a member of the Society of Professional Journalists, the American Society of Journalists and Authors, the North American Travel Journalists Association, the International Food, Wine, and Travel Writers Association, and a number of academic organizations.