The essays in Cather Studies, Volume 8 explore the many locales and cultures informing Willa Cather's fiction. A lifelong Francophile, Cather first visited France in 1902 and returned repeatedly throughout her life. Her visits to France influenced not only her writing but also her interpretation of other worlds: for example, while visiting the American Southwest in 1912, a region that informed her subsequent works, she first viewed that landscape through the prism of her memories of Provence. Cather's intellectual intercourse between the Old and the New World was a two-way street, moving both people and cultural mores between the two. But her worlds extended far beyond France, or even geographical locations. This new volume pairs Cather innovatively with additional influences-theological, aesthetic, even gastronomical-and examines her as tourist and traveler cautiously yet assiduously exploring a diverse range of places, ethnicities, and professions. John J. Murphy is a professor emeritus at Brigham Young University. He is the volume editor of the Willa Cather Scholarly Edition of Death Comes for the Archbishop (Nebraska 1999) and coeditor of the Willa Cather Scholarly Edition of Shadows on the Rock (Nebraska 2005). Françoise Palleau-Papin teaches American literature at the Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle and is the author of This Is Not a Tragedy: The Works of David Markson. Robert Thacker is the Charles A. Dana Professor of Canadian Studies and English at St. Lawrence University. He is the author of The Great Prairie Fact and Literary Imagination and the coeditor of Cather Studies, Volume 4: Willa Cather's Canadian and Old World Connections (Nebraska 1999).