Network Winter 2013 will be held from Monday, January 14 to Friday, January 13, 2013. Additional information will be coming soon.
Information about Network Winter 2012 is included below.
The 2012 Network Winter seminars were organized around the theme of "The Atlantic." Our location in Puerto Rico provided seminar participants with a special vantage point from which they examined the history, culture, and science of the Atlantic and its surrounding regions. This winter's seminars focused on Literatures of the Atlantic, Climate and the Atlantic, and Women of the Atlantic. The seminar schedule included plenary sessions where each seminar convener presented an analysis of the Atlantic from various scholarly perspectives.
The following seminars were offered:
Literatures of the Atlantic
Climate and the Atlantic
Women of the Atlantic
To access FAQs for the Network Winter program, please click here.
LITERATURES OF THE ATLANTIC
About the Seminar
This seminar explored the ways in which the recent "Atlantic turn" in literary and historical studies has reshaped multiple fields in the last twenty years. The course blended readings in criticism and cultural history with an examination of newly recovered texts and canonical cornerstones. In addition, we ventured into current discussions on the place of literary scholarship in the study of the Atlantic World more generally. (The spring 2008 forum cross-published in The William and Mary Quarterly and Early American Literature was our starting point.) We also examined foundational texts in Atlantic Studies, exploring ways in which Atlantic experiences and representations shaped writing from a range of authors and helped produce transatlantic and circum-Atlantic literary cultures.
An important area of exploration was the formation of the Black Atlantic in relation to American, Spanish, British, and French literary studies. What is the fate of nation-based canons after the Atlantic turn? What happens when we redirect scholarly attention from nationalist rhetoric to commercial and imperial interests? In what ways might we understand the Atlantic World as a social imaginary, as well as a set of material conditions? A metropolitan versus a colonial or postcolonial construction? In what ways have European colonization and the Atlantic slave trade both shaped and haunted literary and performance traditions over the last several centuries? How do disciplines of history and literary studies differ in their approaches to these matters, and where do they stand to learn from one another?
In addition to the WMQ forum mentioned above, our texts included Bernard Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concept and Contours; Sibylle Fischer, Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution; selections from Ian Baucom, Spectres of the Atlantic: Finance, Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History; and a recently recovered novel by William Earle, Obi, or the History of Three-fingered Jack.
About the Convener
Bryan Waterman is an associate professor of English at New York University. He earned his Ph.D. in American Studies from Boston University in 2000. He specializes in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American literature and the literary history of New York City. He is the author of Republic of Intellect: The Friendly Club of New York City and the Making of American Literature (Hopkins, 2007) and the co-editor, with Cyrus R. K. Patell, of The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of New York City (2010). Professor Waterman's current research involves seduction stories and sex scandals in the revolutionary Atlantic World.
CLIMATE AND THE ATLANTIC
About the Seminar
The Atlantic region is in one sense a microcosm of Earth's climate with tropics and polar regions, oceans and continents, mountains and deserts, and islands. Yet, in the context of the whole planet, the Atlantic has its distinctive features, and plays a unique role, particularly in the global ocean's overturning circulation. We explored Atlantic climate in three epochs: 1. the modern era and its climatology; 2. the prehistoric Atlantic based on paleoclimate reconstructions; and 3. the future possibility of climate changes.
After an overview of general Earth and climate science, we focused on the Atlantic and its particulars using live links to the superabundance of modern data available through Web-based analysis and display sites, all of which are accessible to non-specialists. Once we understand the climate system, we can imagine and interpret past climates and the events that laid down geological and other traces we can measure today.
Change in the Atlantic region is continual. The Sahara has been green and brown. The Panama straits have open and shut. Ice has accumulated and then released great floods in the North. Hurricanes have raged and waned. How do we know all this? How can we understand these epochs? And what are the lessons we can learn about the resilience and dynamism of the climate system? Finally, climate change projections for the next few generations are being generated by supercomputers around the world. How reliable are these projections, and what shall we expect?
About the Convener
Brian Mapes is an associate professor in meteorology and physical oceanography at the Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences, University of Miami. His specialty is cumulus clouds and storms, viewed as a vital but very variable physical process within larger-scale weather and climate contexts. In pondering the relationship of parts to wholes (or realizations to averages), he enjoys statistics and data processing.
WOMEN OF THE ATLANTIC
About the Seminar
This week of readings, film viewings, dialogue, and debate critically examined the rich intellectual traditions and political activism of women in the African diaspora or women of "the Atlantic," a term coined by Professor Paul Gilroy in his influential text, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1992). While this widely read text focuses on black diasporic communities across the Atlantic, particularly African diasporic intellectual culture, it is conspicuous, from the vantage point of feminist scholars, in its absence of attention to women and its masculinist bias in analyses of the Black Atlantic.
During the seminar, we explored interdisciplinary theoretical frameworks for addressing issues that have impacted women of African descent in the Caribbean, Latin America, Black Britain, and the United States. Specifically, we will consider historical, critical and epistemological perspectives on the experiences of women in the African Diaspora or the Black Atlantic. Discussions were organized thematically and deal with such topics as: global Black feminist theory; the politics and pedagogy of teaching about African-descended women in the aftermath of the trans-Atlantic slave trade; gender and sexuality discourse in Black Atlantic or African Diaspora Studies; and women's movements in African diaspora spaces.
About the Convener:
Beverly Guy-Sheftall is founding director of the Women's Research & Resource Center and Anna Julia Cooper Professor of Women's Studies and English at Spelman College. She is past president of the National Women's Studies Association. Her most recent books are Still Brave: The Evolution of Black Women's Studies (with Stanlie James and Frances Smith Foster) and Who Should Be First: Feminists Speak Out on the 2008 Presidential Campaign (with Johnnetta Betsch Cole).