Transatlantic Conversations: New and Emerging Approaches to Early American Studies (review)

Scholars in Europe and North America often apply theoretical questions in different ways and proceed from different assumptions about the aims, methods, and rhetorical articulations of scholarly and critical innovation.

—"Call for Papers," Transatlantic Conversations

In October 2018 the Society of Early Americanists (SEA) and the Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies hosted the Transatlantic Conversationsworkshop at Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz. The workshop was designed to offer early Americanists in Europe and North America the opportunity to collaborate for the purpose of uniting the different academic praxes of the various national academies across the two continents. In turn, the organizers hoped the workshop would enable delegates to address what they viewed as "gaps" in early American studies, specifically referencing "Eric Slauter's perceived trade gap between historians and literary scholars ( Early American Literature, 2008) … [and] the theory gap between early American literature and later disciplines identified by Ed White and Michael Drexler ( American Literary History, 2010)." In effect, the Transatlantic Conversationsworkshop asked participants to reconsider these boundaries. It encouraged potential participants to ask: What would happen if historians and literary scholars from both sides of the Atlantic came together to share their individual work and critical texts that inform this work? What would be the individual and collective benefits of exploring ways to bridge these geographic and disciplinary divides? Some of these aims were achieved by this workshop, but we believe that the Transatlantic Conversationsworkshop ought to be viewed as a starting point for a more substantial shift in how early Americanists approach transnational collaboration.

Academic praxis and critique of works in progress

The workshop was organized around eight teams of four to five scholars who each precirculated a work-in-progress article and a theoretical text they believed to be central to their approach to early American studies. The eight groups and their moderators were: "Maritime, Transoceanic, and Global American Studies" (Nadine Zimmerli); "Print Culture and Periodical Studies" (Oliver Scheiding); "Revolutionary Media and the Media of Revolution" (Damien Schlarb); "Visual and Material Culture" (Allison Stagg); "Aesthetics, Empire, and Circulation" (Stephen Shapiro); "Religious Networks, Missions, and Reform" (Jan Stievermann); "Comparative Racial Formations" (Joshua Piker); "Environmental and History of Science/Institutions" (Ralph Bauer). In these groups delegates received constructive feedback on their work, which was well received by graduate students, especially, and which has already led to successful publications within that cohort (Helen Kilburn, "Jesuit and Gentleman Planter: Ingle's Rebellion and the Litigation of Thomas Copley S.J.," British Catholic History34.3 [May 2019]: 374–95). Group sessions enabled rich discussion that interrogated practice within the delegates' respective academies. A recurrent theme was the problem of "U.S.A. exceptionalism" in early American studies ("Maritime, Transoceanic, and Global American Studies"; "Religious Networks, Missions, and Reform"). Though many acknowledged that this phenomenon diminished significantly in scholarship, especially in Europe, colleagues working in the United States emphasized that students there remain invested in their national history without appreciation of early America as a part of a global network. Other groups commented on issues of periodization in different geographic and geopolitical contexts. For example, in the United States, "early American history" would likely be understood by most to include the early national period in the United States (until c. 1820) while those working on the Americas broadly defined would mostly likely frame "early American history" as contemporaneous with the early modern period in Europe (c. 1400–1700). This issue of periodization was particularly pertinent to scholars in the group dedicated to the "Environmental and History of Science/Institutions," who acknowledged that the idea of the "Enlightenment" was central to their discipline but for which there was little consensus on periodization. Most importantly, delegates recognized that scholarly practice and archival material would vary significantly for scholars focused on different periodizations of "early American history." Importantly, this...