Tourism and Architectural Simulacra

Nelson Graburn was educated at Cambridge (1958), McGill (1960), and Chicago (PhD, 1963). He has taught at UC Berkeley for 54 years and served as Curator of the Hearst Museum and chair of Tourism Studies. He also taught in Canada, France, UK, Japan, and Brazil and China, and researched Canadian Inuit (1959-2014) Japan (since 1974) and China (since 1991). His work includes Ethnic and Tourist Arts (1976), Japanese Domestic Tourism (1983), Anthropology of Tourism (1983), Multiculturalism in the New Japan (2008), Anthropology in the Age of Tourism (2009), Tourism and Glocalization (2010), Tourism Imaginaries: Anthropological Approaches (2014), Tourism Imaginaries at the Disciplinary Crossroads (2016), Tourism in (Post)Socialist Eastern Europe (2017), and Cultural Tourism Movements (2018).

Maria Gravari-Barbas has a degree in Architecture and Urban Design (University of Athens, 1985) and a PhD in Geography and Planning (Paris IV - Sorbonne, 1991). She was Fellow at the Urban Program of Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, USA (1990). She is the director of the EIREST, a multidisciplinary research team dedicated to tourism studies, with main focus on cultural heritage, development, and urban-tourism evolutions. From 2008 to 2017 she was the director of the Institute for Research and High Studies on Tourism (Institut de Recherches et d'Etudes Superieures du Tourisme, IREST) of Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne University. Since 2009 she is the director of the UNESCO Chair of Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne University and the coordinator of the UNITWIN network 'Tourism, Culture, Development'. She is the author of several books and papers related to tourism, culture, and heritage.

Jean-Francois Staszak received his PhD in Geography at the Sorbonne University. After serving as Associate Professor in the Universities of Amiens (Northern France) and Pantheon-Sorbonne (Paris), he became full Professor at the Geography Department of the University of Geneva (Switzerland). His early research focused on the history and epistemology of Geography, and then on economic and cultural Geography. His most recent work addresses geographical imaginaries in the fields of art and tourism, analysing the geographical othering process and especially the exotic. His understanding of the articulation of geographical representations, practices, and realities owes much to deconstructionist theories and to postcolonial and gender studies. Among his recent books: Quartier reserve. Bousbir, Casablanca Geneve, Georg (2020), Simuler le monde. Panoramas, parcs a theme et autres dispositifs immersifs, Geneve, Metispresse (2019), Frontieres en tous genres. Cloisonnement spatial et constructions identitaires, Rennes, PUR (2017), Cliches exotiques. Le Tour du Monde en photographies 1860-1890, Paris, De Monza (2015).