Speaking

With the option to focus on:

Finding England
Finding Ireland
Finding Scotland

These talks are great for Anglophiles, travel enthusiasts, history buffs, and anyone interested in exploring their cultural heritage.

These programs highlight attractions and activities that will help your audience enrich their lives with English, Irish, and Scottish experiences in the US, no passport or plane ticket required. I can showcase the best of English, Irish, or Scottish history, heritage, and culture across the United States, or I can tailor the program to focus on a specific region of the country.

This talk is great for Shakespeare and theater fans, history buffs, Anglophiles, and travel enthusiasts.

You don’t have to go all the way to England to enjoy the Bard. I'll give your audience great insider tips on finding Shakespeare across the United States. They’ll learn about fabulous festivals, Elizabethan-style theaters, authentic Tudor buildings, beautiful Shakespeare gardens, libraries with precious copies of the rare First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays, and much more.

This talk is great for Shakespeare and theater fans, history buffs, travel enthusiasts, and educators.

America’s relationship with the Bard stretches back to colonial times, when his works influenced our founding fathers. As the country grew, we brought Shakespeare to the prairies of Illinois and Nebraska, the cow towns of Texas and Kansas, and the gold fields of California and Alaska. During the 19th and early 20th century, theater troupes crossed the country performing Shakespeare’s plays, and hundreds of clubs and societies sprang up to study his works, many of them started by women. The Bard continues to influence America today, often in surprising ways. This program shares highlights from our longstanding love affair with Shakespeare.

This talk is great for Shakespeare fans, gardeners, and travel enthusiasts.

Shakespeare mentioned more than 180 types of flowers, trees, fruits, vegetables, and herbs in his plays and sonnets, and Shakespeare gardens have been created all over the world to honor his love of nature. This program looks at the typical elements of a Shakespeare garden and explores some of the more than three dozen Shakespeare gardens in America. I also share ideas for adding a bit of the Bard to your own backyard.

This talk is great for history buffs, Anglophiles, and Downton Abbey fans.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, hundreds of American heiresses crossed the Atlantic in search of titled husbands. These daughters of self-made millionaires didn’t have blue blood, but they did have parents who were willing to pay huge dowries to aristocratic British families that desperately needed cash to maintain their crumbling estates and privileged lifestyles. This talk introduces the headstrong young women who married into a third of Great Britain’s most aristocratic families, pumped the equivalent of $1.5 billion dollars into its economy, and left an indelible mark on the British landscape.

This talk is great for history and architecture buffs, Downton Abbey fans, and travel enthusiasts.

Fabulous Italian villas, elaborate French châteaux, and stately Tudor manor houses – in America? In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the self-made millionaires of America’s Industrial Age showed off their new-found wealth by building magnificent country estates. They scoured Europe for antiques, artwork, and inspiration, and returned home determined to create stately homes that were grounded in historic architecture and filled with carefully hidden modern conveniences. The result was a series of opulent mansions from coast to coast. This program explores the lavish lifestyles of the families that built them and highlights some stunning mansions that are open to the public.