This course focuses on writing by women travelers between East and West from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth century. We will begin with the first secular travel narrative by an Englishwoman, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who lived in Istanbul and traveled through Ottoman territories during the early eighteenth century. Later in the eighteenth century, the lower-class Elizabeth Marsh was held in Morocco, traveling as far as the royal court in Marrakesh. She subsequently published the first “Barbary” captivity narrative by an Englishwoman. Lady Elizabeth Craven’s account of her journey from “Crimea to Constantinople,” which responds to previous travel narratives (including Montagu’s), closes off the eighteenth century. Shifting from the era of Ottoman hegemony to the growing dominance of Western Europeans (particularly the British and French) in the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region, we will examine narratives by nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Turkish and English feminists who literally and figuratively traversed the East/West divide. These include Grace Ellison and Halide Edib, among others. Investigating these women’s travel narratives over the longue durée raises questions about continuity and difference in the representations of gender and Orientalism, which we will engage through a dialogic “inter-imperial” approach.