Bio of Gregory Hubbs

By the age of four, Hubbs had lived in England for three years and already taken a major journey starting in 1963 in a VW bus, being driven by his fearless parents through various civil wars, coups, and bandit attacks across the countries of North Africa (including the Algerian/Moroccan Sand War), and the Middle East (coups in Damascus and Baghdad). His parents navigated through many marginal roads in the deserts and mountains of Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Turkey & Greece, Iraq, and Iran on the way to India following the trail of Alexander the Great. Greg still remembers vividly the incredible hospitality and the smiling faces of so many locals across Mediterranean, North African, and Middle Eastern countries, possessing black and white photos to jog his memory about the unbelievable stories recounted by his parents.

During the ages 8-10, Gregory slowly made his way with his parents through much of Western and Eastern Europe—including several months in the Soviet Union while his mother researched her book on Russian cultural history—in yet another VW bus. He was then sent to a French school for a year near Paris without knowing a word of the language. There he lived, by chance, next to the first hippie commune in France, played with their rock band in avant-garde nightclubs in Paris as the drummer to great reviews, met members of the Living Theater, and came to see and know more than a child his age probably should have.

Thanks to his adventurous and well-educated parents, by the age of 10, Gregory could thus lay claim to having been tugged through more Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Greek, and Roman temple ruins, cathedrals, mosques, and museums than his peers, and had initiated an expansive reading of folklore, mythologies, religious texts, and history that became a primary influence on his future education, imagination, and identity as a world citizen.

At 14-15, Gregory attended a French high school in the south of France. He discovered how little he knew and how overwhelmingly friendly the locals 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, and a castle in Burgundy, through R.E.M.P.A.R.T., in the same rugged manner by which they were originally constructed, and based upon the experience wrote one of the first articles published by Transitions Abroad magazine in 1977.

When Hubbs graduated early from an American high school, he spent a semester of cultural immersion study and travel with college students in Toulouse, France. The program included a homestay with a hospitable French family via the Experiment in International Living program. On his own time, Gregory translated many of the visionary and influential poems of Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, and other writers.

Many subsequent years of backpacking with a Eurail pass through Europe on a meager budget every summer preceded and ensued with occasional visits to his parents' modest 12th-century watchtower in Tuscany to work for money in return for restoring crumbling walls of medieval and even Etruscan origin. Gregory enjoyed other summers sleeping on a Rome rooftop which overlooked the Castel Sant'Angelo and the skyline of The Eternal City, while listening to the soothing music of Mozart and Scarlatti.

Gregory's academic background includes a bachelor's degree in a self-created curriculum centered on the History of Ideas, a very humbling yet challenging and interpretative study of a wide variety of geniuses across the ages. In addition, he wrote his thesis on French Symbolist poetry while at Hampshire College, taking most core classical and modern literature and philosophy courses at Amherst College, Smith College, and Mount Holyoke College as part of the unique and unparalleled Five College Consortium in Amherst, Massachusetts.

Hubbs undertook intensive graduate studies at the University of Paris, Sorbonne in French and Comparative Literature, and German Idealist and Existential Philosophy. While living in Paris, he read voraciously in several languages and visited museums daily while walking the city. He attended numerous seminars at the Collège de France, Science Po, École normale supérieure, and elsewhere with philosophers and theorists such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida as well as poets such as Yves Bonnefoy. From his varied education, and through the deep influence of parents, Gregory was raised to be an intellectual and idealist. Therefore, he recognizes that our relatively brief time on earth and the opportunities to travel, learn, think, and enjoy life are not just a motivation for mere competition, but also for observation and respectful communal celebration.

After many years wandering the world solo and en famille, Gregory consulted in Information Technology in San Francisco and New York City, which allowed for extensive long-term travel and financial freedom, but still somewhat mitigated total immersion in the passionate pursuit of interests overseas which honor his father's influential work. Now editor-in-chief, he is pleased to travel as much as possible while working with experts in their respective fields, professional travel writers, as well as contributing freelancers towards continuing the evolution of TransitionsAbroad.com as the premier no-nonsense web publication dedicated to work, study, travel, living, internships, and volunteering abroad.

In 2014, he was honored to be invited to the White House Travel Blogger Summit on Study Abroad and Global Citizenship.

Immensely 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 2010. Gregory seeks to bring his father's years of trailblazing work to a wider domestic and international audience, while ultimately extending the scope of the original mission by adding his experience and expertise, which is evolving from travel and learning at all stages of his life.

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

Hanging out with goats and camels (1963) in Morocco.

Well-fed by our hosts abroad at four in 1964, with Dr. Joanna Hubbs and Dr. Clay Hubbs, after a return from a year-long trip starting from our 3-year London base, down through Western Europe, Northern Africa, the Middle East, and the Eastern Mediterranean. We traveled in our VW bus following the path of Alexander the Great, and returned to tell the many stories.

Appropriately blurry, hanging out with a French hippie in a Commune near Paris in 1969—after a year of travel in our 2nd VW bus. First, Greg crossed Western Europe through the Soviet Union, then he attended 3rd grade in France without knowing a word of French on the first day. Immersion led to memorizing scores of poems, finishing at the top of his class in math and marbles, while at the bottom in penmanship.

To contact Gregory Hubbs for interviews you may email him at webeditor@transitionsabroad.com. You can also follow Gregory Hubbs via Transitions Abroad on social media.