The Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Cultures Workshop fosters communication, research, and professional growth among multidisciplinary scholars of the Atlantic world. Formerly the Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Cultures Workshop, we continue to encourage innovative methodological and archival engagements with the period’s art, literature, and politics. With our new focus on the Atlantic world, we hope to open our group to conversations with literary scholars, historians, and others who view the cultural interactions and cycles of economic production that took place there over the course of several centuries as formative of modernity. The Atlantic region’s most radical period of historical change occurred contemporaneously with the rise of the British Empire to global hegemony, with important shifts in political and economic organization, and with modernizing transformations of literary forms in Britain and on the continent. It is becoming increasingly clear that there is much to be learned from regarding these parallel events as interconnected. To this end, we aim to create a venue for scholars to consider the contact of hybrid traditions and the deformation and traversing of national borders, while continuing to provide a home within the workshop system for scholars of the period’s literature.

We welcome participants and presenters from any and all fields. Although students of English, American, and western European literatures have traditionally formed the core of our attendance, we enthusiastically invite scholars from other areas of inquiry as well: students of non-Western cultural production, art history, philosophy, the history of science, law, and the social sciences. We look forward to another year of workshopping together.