Interdisciplinary Seminar in Atlantic Studies

Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw is Associate Professor of American Art at the University of Pennsylvania.  She received her PhD in art history from Stanford University in 2000. She was an assistant professor at Harvard University for five years before joining the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania in 2005. Her book, Seeing the Unspeakable: The Art of Kara Walker, was published by Duke University Press in 2004.  She also organized a museum exhibition titled “Portraits of a People: Picturing African Americans in the Nineteenth Century,” in conjunction with the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, Massachusetts.  Professor Shaw is interested in studying issues of race, gender, and class in American art and architecture.

Kathleen Wilson is Professor of History at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. She publishes on the themes of British culture and empire, including The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 1715-1785 (1995); The Island Race:  Englishness Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century (2003); and A New Imperial History:  Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and the Empire 1660-1840 (2004).  She is currently finishing a book entitled The Colonial Stage: Theater, Culture and Modernity in the English Provinces, 1720-1820, that explores the politics of theatrical and social performance and colonial rule in sites that range across the Atlantic and Pacific worlds. This academic year she is a Senior Fellow at the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis, where she has been working on a study entitled Rethinking the Colonial State:  Gender and Governmentality in the Long Eighteenth Century. Her next project (if she lasts that long) will focus on revolution and empire in the 1790s.

Lynn Festa received her Ph.D. in comparative literature from Penn in 2000 and taught in the Harvard English department for several years before joining the faculty at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She is the author of Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006); and co-editor of The Postcolonial Enlightenment (Oxford, forthcoming). This paper is drawn from a new project on the relation between persons and things in eighteenth-century Britain.

17 April: Philip D. Morgan
“The Black Atlantic Revisited”

Philip Morgan is Harry C. Black Professor of History, Johns Hopkins University.  He researches and publishes on the fields of early modern colonial British America and slavery.   His publications include Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (University of N.C. Press and Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1998); The Black Experience and the British Empire (Oxford University Press, 2004), co-edited with Sean Hawkins; and Arming Slaves: From the Classical Era to the American Civil War (Yale University Press, 2006), co-edited with Christopher Brown.  His new project, provisionally entitled, "Jamaican Small World: White and Black in the Eighteenth Century," has four major goals: to explore the process of colonization and the transition from homeland to adopted land in personal and comprehensive terms; to capture the routines and rhythms of daily life in southwestern Jamaica and related corners of the Atlantic world; to probe an interracial world of plain folk; and to paint a vivid portrait of the individuality of ordinary people and the particularity of one local community.