DIRECTORS: Rachel Adams and Caroline Levander

As the conveners of this seminar, we hope to facilitate discussion, to serve as mentors for more junior scholars, and to learn from participants who bring a wide range of knowledge and linguistic competencies to the seminar table. As scholars who did our early work on the United States, we are well aware of the challenges and possibilities made available by an expanded field of American literary study. Professor Caroline Levander has first-hand experiences with how teaching and writing can be vitalized by thinking through a hemispheric lens. She has taught a Mellon graduate seminar on Hemispheric American literature, co-edited a special hemispheric studies issue of American Literary History, and is co-editing a volume of essays entitled Hemisphere and Nation. Her article on "Confederate Cuba" is forthcoming in American Literature in December 2006. Her current book project, Global Nations/Foreign Relations in the American Hemisphere, adopts a north/south rather than an east/west perspective to analyze the contingency and diversity of national formation in the American hemisphere. Her research on the reciprocal relations between seemingly disparate parts of the hemisphere has led to the creation and digitization of Rice's Americas Archive and the Our Americas Archive Partnership with University of Maryland's Early Americas Digital Archive. Professor Rachel Adams' research focuses on the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She is finishing a book called Foreign Relations: Remapping the Cultures of North America, which is a series of case studies that explore the implications of shifting from a national to a continental model of American cultural study. She is the co-editor of a special issue of Comparative American Studies on "Canada and the Americas," and has published on the Seminar's theme in journals such as American Quarterly, American Literary History, and The Americas Review. Her article on blacks in Mexico will be published in Our Americas: Political and Cultural Imaginings (forthcoming, Duke UP). In 2003 she was co-convener of a faculty seminar at NYU on Literature of the Americas, and has taught on inter-American themes at the graduate and undergraduate levels. In 2004-2005, she was a Global Fellow at UCLA's International Institute, where she worked on questions of globalization with an interdisciplinary group of scholars.