Dr. Travis Klingberg

Travis Klingberg is a human geographer specializing in the culture and politics of geographic knowledge in contemporary China. His research has focused on the relationship between domestic independent tourism and new knowledge of China's places, regions, and national geobody. He has worked primarily in Sichuan Province, between the Chengdu metropolitan area and the Ganzi Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture. Travis is a lecturer at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he received his PhD, and was an NSF Graduate Research fellow and Fulbright-Hays fellow. While at the Rachel Carson Center, Travis will be working on a book manuscript titled Exploring Place: Domestic Tourism and the Politics of Geographic Knowledge in Post-reform China, which will examine how new desires to experience rural, remote, and natural places by urban Chinese over the past 20 years have become an integral part of the politics of territory in China.

Selected publications:

• Klingberg, Travis. "A Routine Discovery: The Practice of Place and the Opening of the Yading Nature Reserve." In Mapping Shangrila: Nature, Personhood, and Polity in the Sino-Tibetan Borderlands, edited by Emily T. Yeh and Chris Coggins, 75–94. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2014.
  
• Klingberg, Travis, and Tim Oakes. "Producing Exemplary Consumers: Tourism and Leisure Culture in China's Nation-building Project." In China In and Beyond the Headlines, edited by Timothy Weston and Lionel Jensen, 195–213. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012.