In this essay, I describe an undergraduate course I designed and taught on eighteenth-century women's travelogues and advocate for more courses that explicitly focus on noncanonical genres and authors. Using student papers, I explore how students worked through their discomfort with new genre conventions and improved their overall reading and analytical skills. I hope that my outline of the course will be useful to those who teach or will be teaching women's travel literature or who wish to focus courses on noncanonical authors and genres.

Since the publication of Robert Halsband's biography of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in 1956 and his later edited collection of her letters, modern scholars have been fascinated with the network of critical discourses in Montagu's writing in the Turkish Embassy Letters. Analyzing her work on multiple axes – religious, political, scientific, and gendered – contemporary critics have made this classic text accessible to new generations of readers and thinkers. Yet as scholarship on these letters continues to flourish, certain trends persist, often at the expense of new avenues of inquiry. This article proposes that several recent threads in the scholarly conversation surrounding the Turkish Embassy Letters have the potential to be expanded in three promising new directions to more fully explore Montagu's religious identity and its relationship to her discussions of religious belief and practice; her unique role as a mother while traveling; and her place in the smallpox variolation controversy and its relationship to disability.

This article argues for the use of experiential learning to teach eighteenth-century travel literature to undergraduates. Exploring the three-dimensional virtual world of Second Life, students wrote their own travelogues and reflected on the ways in which the experience affected how they analyzed travelogues for the rest of the semester.

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