Transatlantic Currents

Faculty in Transatlantic Currents

This thematic arc considers literature and other artistic productions as they are shaped by transatlantic currents -- movements of people, things, and cultural traditions throughout the Atlantic world. This area begins in 1492 and extends into the present, exploring the interactions among the four continents that form the Atlantic’s basin. Faculty working in this area interrogate the colonial enterprise, slavery, international trade, and the globalizing literary marketplace. With particular interests in the “Black Atlantic” (the transatlantic expansion of a black culture), the “Green Atlantic” (the ecological importance of the ocean itself), the Caribbean, and Modernism, our students and faculty examine the political, environmental, economic, and aesthetic implications of this movement of people and ideas. Recent graduate courses include “Literary Modernisms in the US,” “American Modernism,” “Circum-Caribbean Literature,” “20th-century British Poetry,” “Triangulating Transatlanticism,” and “Modern Aesthetics.” Graduate students interested in this area also benefit from events sponsored by the Georgia Colloquium in 18th- and 19th-century British Literature, the British and Irish Studies Program, the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Institute, the Willson Center’s Interdisciplinary Modernism(s) Workshop, and from the English Department’s connections with the Lamar Dodd School of Art.

Course work in this area may include, but is not limited to, the following courses:

ENGL 6451 The Global Eighteenth Century

ENGL 6650 Modern Drama

ENGL 6660 Twentieth-Century British Poetry

ENGL 6670 The Twentieth-Century British Novel

ENGL 6685 Post-Colonial Literature

ENGL 6695 Topics in Post-Colonial Literature

ENGL 6698 Postcolonial & Postsecular Literature

ENGL 6730 American Fiction 1918-1960

ENGL 6750 American Writing after 1960

ENGL 8600 Seminar in Modern Literature

Exam areas could include, but are not limited to:

20th-Century British, 20th-Century American, African American, Contemporary, Transnational Networks, and Literary Criticism and Theory.

Related Research Approaches

American Literary Studies

African American and Multicultural Studies

Eighteenth-Century Literary Studies

Modern British Literature Studies (19th-21st Century)