The Atlantic World Research Network

The UNCG Atlantic World Research Network will embrace and foster interdisciplinary Atlantic World research, teaching, and creative work across campus. The Network also seeks to identify UNCG as the leader in Atlantic World Studies in the southeastern United States, and will provide leadership in Atlantic World Studies throughout North America and around the world.

In September 2004, in order to inaugurate the Department of History’s new doctoral program, UNCG hosted its first international, interdisciplinary Atlantic World Conference, bringing historians and literary scholars from all over North America and from Europe and filling the Elliott University Center to capacity for two days (see 2004 Atlantic World Conference). Since that very successful event, Atlantic World Studies have grown as a scholarly field around the Atlantic Rim and around the world, and many Atlanticists on our faculty and elsewhere have noted and promoted the continuing emergence of an interdisciplinary Atlantic World emphasis at UNCG.

Atlantic World Studies, though originating in the Humanities, is a field far larger than History or English, Classical Studies or the modern Languages. As an emerging area of investigation, the Atlantic World encompasses African American Studies, Art, Broadcast & Cinema, Business Administration, Caribbean Studies, Classical Studies, Communication Studies, Consumer Apparel and Retail Studies, Dance, Educational Leadership, Environmental Studies, Geography, the Library, Music, Public Health Education, Theater, and Women’s and Gender Studies—to name the specialties of some of the UNCG colleagues who are involved with the network.

The Atlantic World Research Network will be interdisciplinary without being anti-disciplinary; it will be international while exploring the lively creative power of national and local cultures; and it will be entrepreneurial, attempting new and sometimes unprecedented things as a vital and forward-looking UNCG establishes and raises its research profile in the community of research and scholarship.