Since 2003, when the History Department inaugurated its PhD program with Atlantic World among its areas of special interest, programmatic elements of an interdisciplinary UNCG Atlantic World Network have continued to emerge.
Our UNCG faculty and graduate affiliates are found across the Academic Units: in the Schools of Business; Education; Health and Human Sciences; Music, Theatre, and Dance; and Nursing, in the College of Arts and Sciences, in University Libraries; and in the Lloyd International Honors College. Departments encompassed include African American Studies, Art, Biology, Business Administration, Caribbean Studies, Chemistry and Biochemistry, Classical Studies, Communication Studies, Consumer Apparel and Retail Studies, Dance, Educational Leadership, Environmental Studies, Geography, Library Science, Media Studies, Music, Public Health Education, Theatre, and Women’s and Gender Studies—to name the specialties of some of the UNCG colleagues who are supporting and attending our many events.
Thus far our Advisory Board has drawn faculty from Business Administration, English, French, Geography, History, Human Development, Media Studies, Musicology, Political Science, Spanish, and Theatre. Our many Atlantic World Lunchtime Colloquia have treated topics in all of these disciplines, and others, including Anthropology, Aviation, Biblical Studies, Biochemistry, Digital Archiving, Ethnomusicology, German, Mafia Studies, Pedagogy, and Religion.
–The Atlantic World topics addressed by AWRN’s Sponsored Speakers have included Transatlantic Literary Modernism, Enslaved Women in Latin America, George Herbert’s Transatlantic Legacies, African Girls in War, Africana Studies, Danish Jazz, Voltaire and Dessalines in the Theatre of the Atlantic, Transatlantic Literary Friendship, West African/Christian/Jewish Symbolism in Luso-African Carvings, The Hispanic Transatlantic, The Fate of Reading in the 20th Century, Desire/Dulcinea/Disenchantment in David Lynch’s “Mulholland Drive,” The Bible and Transatlantic Modernity, Booker T. Washington in Sicily, Dickens Our Contemporary, Shakespeare’s “Tiger Mothers,” Grimms’ Fairy Tales at 200, 20th-Century Mexican Writers and the U.S., and Indentured Italian Women in the American South.
—UNCG’s International and Global Studies Committee (IGS) is a multi-disciplinary program that allows students to explore opportunities in the humanities and social sciences from such disciplines as history, anthropology, economics, political science, public health, foreign languages, and sociology. Students will be prepared for careers in business, government, international development agencies, non-governmental organizations, philanthropic agencies and the arts (see http://www.uncg.edu/igs/ ).
—Individual Research: Discovering the Discoverers. In addition to these shared programs and initiatives, individual Atlantic-World-related research and creative activities are thriving across campus and across disciplines at UNCG. A survey of current departmental and unit websites throughout the campus reveals that a remarkable range of more than 150 faculty in widely varied disciplines are pursuing projects that address the transatlantic exchange—in the humanities, the social sciences, the natural sciences, and the arts. For this list of faculty pursuing some form of research or creative activity related to life on and around the Atlantic Rim, please click on Discovering the Discoverers.
An important part of the Atlantic World Research Network’s mission is to increase contact between colleagues across departments and units, bringing them together to relate their work in mutually fruitful ways—in other words, to connect the dots, to discover new constellations of learning. See Atlantic World Lunchtime Colloquia.
