Eric Zuelow appears in British TV series Grand Tours of Scotland

Eric G.E. Zuelow, Ph.D., UNE assistant professor of European history, is currently appearing in the BBC1 television series Grand Tours of Scotland: Series II on British television.

The series features host Paul Murton, a Scottish filmmaker and on-air personality, who discovered a copy of a nineteenth-century tourism guidebook in his family home.  Inspired, Murton decided to follow in the footsteps of Victorian tourists while at the same time talking with tourism history experts to learn more about the development of leisure travel in his home country.

A veteran of the first BBC1 Grand Tours series, Zuelow re-appears in the second season to talk with Murton about Victorian ideas regarding death, dying, and so-called “dark tourism.”  The segment was filmed at Melrose Abbey in the Scottish borders in early May 2011.

“We filmed at midnight in an abbey that is reportedly haunted by both an angry monk and a disgruntled wizard,” stated Zuelow.  “What better place to experience the sublime, the beautiful, and the just plain terrifying?”

The first series of Grand Tours proved tremendously popular and has now aired multiple times on various BBC stations.  It is also available for purchase on DVD.

Zuelow is the author of  Making Ireland Irish: Tourism and National Identity since the Irish Civil War and editor of Touring Beyond the Nation: A Transnational Approach to European Tourism History.