Atlantic Narratives

‌Sunil Agnani has a joint appointment with the Department of History and the Department of English. He teaches courses on the European Enlightenment, eighteenth-century British and French thought, and on the literature of empire and decolonization. He is currently completing a book manuscript, “European Anticolonialism at its Limit: Denis Diderot and Edmund Burke, 1770-1800,” which reads the literature of the Enlightenment in relation to debates in postcolonial thought. Recent publications include an essay on Denis Diderot entitled "Doux commerce, douce colonisation" in The Anthropology of the Enlightenment (Stanford UP, 2007) and an article examining Edmund Burke's writings on France in relation to his involvement in Indian affairs, "Jacobinism in India, Indianism in English Parliament" (Cultural Critique, Winter 2008). His research aims to unite a training in literary fields and methodologies with an interdisciplinary approach that draws on cultural theory and the history of political thought to engage critically with European literature and thought of the eighteenth century.  On this topic, he recently participated in a roundtable with literary critics, historians and anthropologists on "The end of postcolonial theory?" (Publications of the Modern Language Association / PMLA 122, 2007).

‌Christopher Hodson specializes in colonial and Atlantic history, with an emphasis on the eighteenth-century French empire, comparative imperialism, and early modern diasporas. After earning his PhD. from Northwestern University in 2004, Chris spent two years as an Andrew Mellon Fellow at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, University of Pennsylvania. In 2007, he came to BYU, where he teaches both upper- and lower-division courses in the Department of History. He is currently completing his book manuscript, Refugees: The Worlds of the Acadian Diaspora, which will be published by Oxford University Press. His next project, to be co-authored with Brett Rushforth of the College of William and Mary, is entitled Discovering Empire: France and the Atlantic World from the Age of Columbus to the Rise of Napoleon. It will be published by Basic Books. Chris’s articles have appeared in several journals, including Early American Studies, Eighteenth-Century Studies, French Historical Studies, Outre-mers: révue d’histoire, and the William and Mary Quarterly. He is co-director (with Eric Hinderaker of the University of Utah) of the Rocky Mountain Seminar in Early American History (http://history.byu.edu/rmseah). He lives in Springville, Utah, with his wife, Sarah, and their three children.

‌William Nelson specializes in European history from the eighteenth century to the present day, with a special focus on the intellectual history of France in the eighteenth century. He is also interested in the relationship between France and its colonies, particularly those in the Atlantic world. Before coming to the University of Miami, Professor Nelson was a Mellon Postdoctoral Research Fellow and Associate Director of Studies at the Centre for History and Economics, King’s College, The University of Cambridge (UK). He is currently working on revising and expanding his doctoral dissertation into a book manuscript entitled “The Weapon of Time: Constructing the Future in France, 1750 to Year One.” While working on his dissertation he was the recipient of several awards including the Marjorie M. Farrar Memorial Award from the Society for French Historical Studies for an outstanding dissertation in progress, a Chancellor's Dissertation Year Fellowship from the University of California, Los Angeles, and a Mellon Foundation Dissertation Research Fellowship. Currently, he is also working on a research project that explores the development of ideas on race in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. 

‌Frank Palmeri is Professor of English and Director of Graduate Studies at the University of Miami. He has written Satire in Narrative (1990) and Satire, History, Novel: Narrative Forms 1665-1815 (2003), and edited Humans and Other Animals in Eighteenth-Century British Culture (2006). He has also published articles on Thomas Pynchon and American culture in Postmodern Culture, ELH, and other venues. 

Chris Iannini received his Ph.D. in English from the Graduate Center, CUNY in 2004. He is a specialist in colonial and nineteenth century American literature, with strong interests in the history of science, Caribbean studies, and Atlantic studies. His articles and reviews have appeared in William and Mary Quarterly, Mississippi Quarterly: the Journal of Southern Cultures, Early American Literature,  Journal of the Early Republic, and an edited collection entitled Humboldt and the Hemisphereedited by Vera Kutzinski and Laura Walls. He is currently completing a book manuscript entitled "Fatal Revolutions: Natural History, West Indian Slavery and the Routes of American Literature."

José R. Jouve-Martín is Associate Professor in the Department of Hispanic Studies at McGill University (Montreal, Canada). He obtained a Licenciatura in Philosophy from Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and a PhD in Latin American Literature and Cultural Studies from Georgetown University. His main area of interest is the intersection of history, memory and literature in the Hispanic world. At the Atlantic Narratives conference he will present the paper entitled "Music, history and (science-)fiction: Philip Glass' The Voyage and the operatic lives of Christopher Columbus", which is part of his current research project on the representation of the discovery and colonization of America on the opera stage -an exploration of the transformations that historical discourses undergo when they cross different genres and  national/cultural traditions. In addition to this, Prof. Jouve-Martin's research has also focused on colonial lettered culture and the use of written documents by slaves and their descendants in 17th- and 18th-century Spanish America. He has authored the book Esclavos de la ciudad letrada: esclavitud, escritura y colonialismo en Lima (1650-1700) [Slaves of the Lettered City: Writing, Slavery and Colonialism in Lima ) (1650-1700)] (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 2005). He has also co-edited the volumes The Constitution of the Hispanic Baroque, (an Special Issue of Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos) and Contemporary Debates in Ecology, Culture and Society in Latin America, forthcoming as a Special Issue in Latin American Research Review. He is also author of numerous articles published in academic journals such as Colonial Latin American Review, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, Theatralia and Hispanófila, among others.

‌James Sweet’s research and teaching interests center on Africans and their descendants in the broader world. To date, his research has focused on the cultural connections between Africa (especially Angola) and the early colonial slave communities of Brazil. Professor Sweet’s current project is an examination of the eighteenth-century Portuguese-Atlantic world as seen through the lens of an enslaved, and then freed, man who traveled from Nigeria, to Brazil, and finally to Portugal. Future projects will focus on Jamaica and South Africa, particularly the impacts of gender, labor, religion, and race in the forging of “modern” nation states. He was a Walter Page Hines Fellow at the National Humanities Center, Research Triangle Foundation in 2006-2007, and his book Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the African-Portuguese World, 1441-1770 (University of North Carolina Press, 2003) was awarded the Wesley Logan Prize for Best Book on African Diaspora History, 2004 by the American Historical Association.

Anna Brickhouse received her Ph.D. and M.A. in English from Columbia University and a B.A. in English and French from the University of Virginia. She is currently an associate professor of English and American Studies (back) at the University of Virginia, teaching courses in early American literature, hemispheric studies, and “southern” studies. Her first book was on nineteenth-century US literary relations with the wider Americas, and she is currently working on a book about models of “unsuccessful” translation in the early Americas, which centers on the life and travels an early indigenous translator from would later be called Virginia.

Bianca Premo has researched topics ranging from Andean women and the Spanish colonial economy, to the history of childhood, to African slavery in the Americas, to state policy, law and creole writings during the last decades of Spanish rule.  What binds her diverse research interests is a desire to understand how Spanish Americans lived colonialism every day.

Her first book, Children of the Father King: Youth, Authority and Legal Minority in Colonial Lima (2005), reveals how Lima’s children were socialized into colonial hierarchies and how adults viewed and practiced their roles as authority figures over children in a legal culture that favored elite fathers and distant kings. She has also co-edited Raising an Empire, a volume of historical scholarship about children and childhood in early modern Spain, Portugal and colonial Latin America, and is the author of various articles and book chapters on women, children and the law in colonial Peru. For her second monograph, Prof. Premo is undertaking a comparative study of civil litigation in Peru, Mexico and Spain in the eighteenth century.   

Lisa Voigt was Associate Professor at the University of Chicago before joining OSU's Department of Spanish and Portuguese in 2009. Her book, Writing Captivity in the Early Modern Atlantic: Circulations of Knowledge and Authority in the Iberian and English Imperial Worlds, was published by the University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture in 2009. She wrote the book with support from an NEH Fellowship at the Newberry Library (2002-2003) and a Mellon Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture in Williamsburg, Virginia (2005-2006). Her teaching and research on colonial Latin American literature and culture address transatlantic and comparative issues, and include such topics as captivity and shipwreck narratives in the Spanish and Portuguese empires, mestizo historiography in New Spain, and Baroque festivals and creole identity in the Andes and Brazil. She has published on these and other topics in Colonial Latin American Review, Early American Literature, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, Revista Iberoamericana, Romance Notes, MLN and Renaissance Quarterly, among other journals and collected volumes.