Biography of Dr. Joanna Hubbs

Dr. Joanna Hubbs, a European who has traveled extensively since her birth 82 years ago, is the president and senior editor of www.Transitionsabroad.com, and has been helping select and edit copy for the website since 2007 after the passing of her late husband, Dr. Clay Hubbs, the visionary founder and publisher of Transitions Abroad magazine in 1977.

In 2006 she retired as professor of Russian cultural studies at Hampshire College where she had taught since 1971 after completing her Ph.D. at the University of Washington. She received a prestigious Woodrow Wilson fellowship to pursue her doctoral studies.

Though offered teaching positions by many of the most prestigious traditional institutions of higher learning in the country upon completion of her Ph.D. in Russian Studies, Joanna was drawn to Hampshire College, a very progressive institution, due to its strong stated commitment to free speech and social activism within the unique context of the 5-college consortium in Amherst, Massachusetts. Hubbs was one of the first faculty members hired at the college to help build a community of teachers and students—an environment in which learning, discussion, and debate would go on easily and continually, formally and informally, in the classroom and out.

Dr. Hubbs has written on topics including Russian history, Russian and European literature, and folklore. Her deliberately controversial book (she did not follow the contemporary critical theory/linguistic fashions of the times as she found the methodologies to be superficial and inherently fleeting as modes of analysis), Mother Russia: The Feminine Myth in Russian Culture, is an interpretive and suggestive study of Russian history starting with influences from prehistoric times. It has been translated into Japanese and is frequently cited. For her work, Joanna received the 1989 Heldt Prize for Excellence from the Association for Women in Slavic Studies.

Professor Hubbs taught courses at Hampshire College designed to challenge students to think critically, deeply, and beyond the superficial by using imagination, intuition, and reason. She taught everything from great novelists such as Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Gogol, Turgenev, Pushkin, Bulgakov and Voltaire to Russian Cultural History, Russian Film, the Persistence of Myth in Modern Literature, Modernism and Film, and the French Enlightenment.

Joanna was married for 48 years to former Air Force jet pilot, journalist, professor, and study abroad advisor Dr. Clay Hubbs, who left his teaching position at Hampshire College to publish, and edit Transitions Abroad magazine on a full-time basis. The couple has lived and traveled all over the world, most often in a nomadic manner. Their son, Gregory Hubbs, continues to enhance and expand the TransitionsAbroad.com website—which has been inspired by family and independent travel as well as years of living abroad. Joanna has frequently traveled, studied, and lived abroad over the course of more than 75 of her 82 years, and would travel without end if possible.

Joanna was born and raised in Europe, spent her several years in England where she created mayhem in "finishing schools," yet still managed to have an audience with the Queen, lived 10 years in Switzerland having neighbors such as Charlie Chaplin (whose kids she played with) in Vevey on the Lake of Geneva in her teens (Editor's note: she absolutely does not know and nor would she wish her son to drop a fraction of the names of the many other very famous people she knew and knows well, that her son regards her as the most intelligent, widely educated, and sophisticated human being he has ever met, and that she is a fabulous French and Italian cook).

Joanna speaks, reads, and writes in five languages fluently. She has lived long-term in Italy (she owned a small rustic watchtower in Tuscany for 35 years with Clayton Hubbs), France, Switzerland, England, both coasts and central states of the U.S. She has traveled slowly and long-term in countries and regions such as Russia, Central and Eastern Europe, the Balkans, most every Mediterranean and Scandinavian country, Northern Africa, the Middle East, and many locations in North and Central America—not including the countless countries she has visited for shorter periods during the course of cross-continental trips.

Hubbs has written two novels, and is working on a third about the late highly influential Romantic and Early Modern French visionary poet and adventurer Arthur Rimbaud, whose voyages through Africa she retraced. Joanna has also published short stories in Europe. She plans to continue her fiction writing and poetry in retirement, in addition to continual travel, an insatiable appetite for reading, learning, discussion, and yes, especially debate! Joanna tempers her intellectual intensity and boundless energy with other pursuits such as art, classical music, dance, French and Italian cooking, fine dining of all kinds, and a passion for witty conversation and storytelling.

Dr. Hubbs is presently involved in selecting and editing articles while judging writing contests for www.Transtionsabroad.com, helping to continue to steer the editorial direction towards what she finds interesting and informative about anything abroad. To contact her or for interviews, please email her at senioreditor@transitionsabroad.com.