Interdisciplinary Seminar in Atlantic Studies

Mark Peterson is an associate professor of history at the University of Iowa, where he has taught since 1998.  He received his B.A. in History and Science from Harvard University, and his Ph.D. in History from Harvard as well.  Before coming to Iowa, he taught in the History and Literature program at Harvard and in the History Department at Boston University.  His first book, The Price of Redemption: The Spiritual Economy of Puritan New England (Stanford, 1997), explored the impact of economic and commercial development, centered in Boston, on the evolution of the religious culture of New England.  His current book project, a history of Boston in the Atlantic world from 1630 to 1865, examines the city's evolving connections to the larger Atlantic community in the early modern era.  His numerous articles include "Puritanism and Refinement in Early New England: Reflections on Communion Silver," William and Mary Quarterly 58 (April 2001). During the 2003-04 academic year, he was in residence at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Mass., as a Burkhardt Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies.

Michal Braddick is Professor of History at the University of Sheffield, where hehas taught since 1990.  He has published on the state in early modern England including, State Formation in Early Modern England (2000) and on popular politics and resistance to the state.  He is the co-editor (with John Walter) of Negotiating Power in Early Modern Society (2001).  A third strand of his work deals with English overseas trade and settlement.  He contributed an essay to the Oxford History of the British Empire and is co-editor (with David Armitage) of The British Atlantic World, 1500-1800 (2002).  He is currently working on a history of the English revolution, to be published by Penguin.

April Hatfield is Associate Professor of History at Texas A & M University and Barra Postdoctoral Fellow at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies.  She specializes in Early American, Atlantic, Early Southern, and Caribbean History, and is the author of Atlantic Virginia: Intercolonial Relations in the Seventeenth Century (University of Pennsylvania  Press, 2004); “A ‘very wary people in their bargaining’ or ‘very good marchandise’: English Traders’ Views of Free and Enslaved Africans, 1550-1650,” Slavery & Abolition 25 (December, 2004); and “Spanish Colonization Literature, Powhatan Geographies, and English Perceptions of Tsenacommacah/Virginia,” The Journal of Southern History 69 (2003).  Her current project examines early modern Anglo-Spanish relations in North America and the Caribbean.

11 April: Emma Rothschild
“The Atlantic and Other Oceans”

Emma Rothschild is Director of the Centre for History and Economics at King’s College, Cambridge, and Visiting Professor of History at Harvard University. Current projects include a short book on anxiety and colonial administration in France, “The Inner Life of Empires,” about an adventurous family in 18th-century Scotland, and a book about the East India Company and the American Revolution. Recent publications include “Language and Empire, circa 1800” (Historical Research, May 2005), “Global Commerce and the Question of Sovereignty in the Eighteenth-Century Provinces” (Modern Intellectual History, April 2004), and Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet and the Enlightenment (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press 2001).