Bio of Gregory Hubbs

Extremely proud to be the son of Dr. Clay Hubbs, the founding editor and publisher of Transitions Abroad Publishing, Inc. (founded 1977), Gregory Hubbs assumed the role of Web content editor in 2004 and editor-in-chief in 2008. Gregory wished to bring to a wider domestic and international audience his father's years of pioneering work while ultimately extending the scope of the original mission.

Born in 1960 to his unabashedly European-born mother Dr. Joanna Hubbs (also a Professor of Russian and European Cultural History and Literature), Gregory has been blessed to have traveled, studied, volunteered, and lived abroad for many extended periods of his life. In fact, Gregory's life has been the embodiment of much of what Transitions Abroad has discussed since its inception — educational, responsible, and cultural immersion travel and living abroad.

By the age of four, Hubbs had lived in England for three years and already been around the world once in a VW bus, being driven by his fearless and perhaps naive guidebook-free parents through various civil wars in the Middle East while navigating deserts in Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Iran, Iraq, and Northern Africa following the trail of Alexander the Great and other explorers. By the age of ten he had visited much of Western and Eastern Europe — including several months in the Soviet Union — in yet another VW bus, this time being tossed into a French school for a year near Paris without knowing a word of the language. There he lived next to the first hippie commune in France, played with their rock band in Paris, cavorted with the Living Theater, and came to see and know more than a child his age should have.

By the age of 10, Gregory could lay claim to having been "dragged" through more Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Greek, and Roman temple ruins, cathedrals, mosques, and museums than any of his peers, and had initiated a wide reading of world mythologies, religions, and fairy tales which became a primary influence on his future education, imagination, and identity as a world citizen.

At the ages of 14-15, Gregory attended a French high school in the south of France and discovered how little he knew and how overwhelmingly friendly the natives living on the French Riviera can be to an American willing to speak and respect their language and culture.

At 16, he volunteered to help reconstruct an ancient watermill deep in the French Vaucluse mountains through R.E.M.P.A.R.T. in the same rugged manner by which it was originally constructed, and based on the experience wrote one of the first articles published by Transitions Abroad.

When Hubbs graduated early from an American high school, he spent a semester of immersion study and travel with college students in Toulouse, France, including a homestay with a hospitable French family via the Experiment in International Living program while attempting a translation of the visionary poetry of Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud.

Many years of backpacking with a Eurail pass through Europe on a meager budget every summer preceded and ensued with occasional visits to his parent's modest 12th century watchtower in Tuscany in order to beg for money in return for physical labor restoring 8-foot-deep crumbling walls of Etruscan origin.

Gregory's academic background includes a bachelor's degree in the History of Ideas and French Symbolist Poetry from Hampshire College, as well as intensive graduate work at the University of Paris, Sorbonne in French and Comparative Literature along with German Idealist and Existential Philosophy. While living in Paris, he read voraciously in several languages, and attended numerous seminars at the Collège de France and elsewhere with then-fashionable philosophers such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida as well as poets such as Yves Bonnefoy.

In an ill-advised period of rebellion against a nomadic life with his parents and many years wandering the world solo and en famille, Gregory consulted in Information Technology, which allowed for extensive long-term travel and freedom but did little to quench the thirst for a mission not primarily involving making yet more money for those who do not need it. He is very pleased to work with experts in their respective fields as well as freelancers towards continuing the evolution of TransitionsAbroad.com as the premier no-nonsense Web portal and webzine for work, study, travel, and living abroad.

Early years (1963) in the Valley of the Kings and Giza, Egypt.

Hanging out with a French hippie in a Commune near Paris in 1969.

To contact Gregory Hubbs for interviews you may e-mail him at webeditor@transitionsabroad.com.