Neil Rennie

Neil Rennie has learned and taught at UCL. Over the years he has published poems and reviews in various newspapers and periodicals, including the London Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, Guardian, Spectator, London Magazine. He has enjoyed discussing music, books and travel on various programmes on Radio 4 and the World Service.

Neil Rennie’s principal research interest is in the history of travel, real and imaginary, and of travel literature, French, English and American, from the Renaissance to the present. His first book, Far-Fetched Facts: The Literature of Travel and the Idea of the South Seas, was a long historical and geographical voyage in the literature of travel, from classical times, via accounts of the New World, to the accounts of the South Sea islands that lay beyond. His second book, Pocahontas, Little Wanton: Myth, Life and Afterlife, explored the life and myth of the Powhatan ‘princess’, Pocahontas.

Neil Rennie's latest book, published in September 2013, is Treasure Neverland: Real and Imaginary Pirates. Swashbuckling eighteenth-century pirates are still popular and well-known today.