Atlantic History Field

[DGrayson]

A faculty member at UT Austin had recommended that I look into the Atlantic History field offered by the graduate department there. I'm somewhat interested as it covers some of what I am interested in (Early Modern Europe) while giving me exposure to some early American that I feel like will help on the job market. Does anyone have experience in this field that can give their impressions of it?

[kotov]

I mean, it's not my field, but my program is big on the transnational/comparative thing so we have some faculty in it. I could recommend some books, if you'd like?

[dr. t]

@mvlchicago has your answers.

Edited October 22, 2015 by telkanuru

[mvlchicago]

*poof appears* oooof.

I'll try to come back to this maybe tomorrow; but a couple brief points.

1. "I'm somewhat interested as it covers some of what I am interested in (Early Modern Europe) while giving me exposure to some early American that I feel like will help on the job market."

As someone perpetually worried about the job market, I feel this a lot. But I want to emphasize that the Atlantic World (currently) isn't something into which one dips their foot. Because the Atlantic World as a subfield is still being rigorously challenged on a lot of fronts and few schools take it seriously (Austin, Vanderbilt, NYU, Hopkins, Harvard, Brown?) you often need to be doing twice as much work as someone who's in a traditional field; I'm currently applying for FLAS funding to learn Nahuatl, a language that is simply necessary for me to even access the sort of sources that are needed to tell everyday histories just to see if that's something I want to do. That is to say, I would resist this temptation unless your project is pushing you to ask questions about the broader Atlantic network (I can talk about my experience with this tomorrow, if you're interested!)

2. "UT Austin had recommended that I look into the Atlantic History field offered by the graduate department there."

I'm unsure what part of EM Europe you're doing, but from what I know about Austin's current faculty lineup, it's not just "Atlantic History" you'd be doing, but the Hispanic Atlantic (Jorge Canizares-Esguerra and Marion Bodian are on my mind rn.) That is to say, if you're doing EM Spain, great! You likely have the languages and context. But it could be difficult to make the jump from Germany, Eastern Europe, or the UK to the specific strengths of Austin's program (and Jorge C-E really is one of the big names out there.) 

Edited October 22, 2015 by mvlchicago

[Riotbeard]

A faculty member at UT Austin had recommended that I look into the Atlantic History field offered by the graduate department there. I'm somewhat interested as it covers some of what I am interested in (Early Modern Europe) while giving me exposure to some early American that I feel like will help on the job market. Does anyone have experience in this field that can give their impressions of it?

That's kind of a loaded question as it's a huge field.  Atlantic was my second field in exams, and my project has significant Atlantic dimensions, but the field is pretty old at this point. If you are talking Anglo-Atlantic, the key early works include Jack Greene Pursuits of Happiness, Bernard Bailyn The Peopling of British North America, and Volume 1 of D. W. Meinig's The Shaping of America. I mean really some the earliest Atlanticist are people like Eric Williams, Phillip Curtain, and Alfred Crosby.

A lot of the base ideas that make up the foundation of the field come out of Braudel's The Mediterranian.  In terms of the "difficulty" of embarking on an Atlantic project, it really depends.  A lot of Atlanticist work on specific areas and show their relations to wider Atlantic communities, these are normal and very doable.

A useful starting point would be Jack Greene and Phillip Morgan's edited reader Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal.  This has field essays on the each sub-discipline (i.e. French Atlantic, Spanish Atlantic, Black Atlantic, etc.) by really important scholars.

Atlantic history doesn't have to be writing the history of the "Inland Sea", so much as showing how one place is apart of larger networks of exchange (This is what most of Atlantic history is).  Also, recent challenges to Atlantic history have come from Global Historians (There is a notable article by Peter Coclanis from maybe a decade ago), and people who think the Atlantic has overshadowed North American interest in a passage to the Pacific (Paul Mapp).

It's a good field, and being "transnational" is increasingly important, but it's not a huge undertaking or particularly novel at this point.  If you are an early Americanist, it's borderline expected that you will engage with the Atlantic World.  Almost everybody in my department who works on history before the 20th century does Atlantic history including the Hispanists, Francophones, and Americanists.