Affiliated Programs and Fields of Discipline

The History of the Atlantic World | History of the American South | History of Medicine

Graduate Studies at Vanderbilt
The History of the Atlantic World

Vanderbilt ranks among the nation's top twenty research universities and boasts a diverse and dynamic History Department.  One of the newest and most exciting areas of faculty research and graduate training at Vanderbilt is the History of the Atlantic World.  Graduate students who choose to complete a major or minor field in Atlantic World history at Vanderbilt will be introduced to a wide range of literatures addressing the interactions among European, Native American, and African peoples.  The following faculty forms the core of our Atlantic World program: Richard J. M. Blackett , James A. Epstein, Jane Landers, Catherine Molineux, and Daniel Usner.

Related Faculty from Other Departments
In addition to the five faculty members who form the core of the Atlantic World History cluster, graduate students may work with faculty from other Vanderbilt departments with related interests. These include professors in the Spanish and Portuguese department including: Jason Borges, Earl Fitz, Carlos Jauergui, William Luis, Paul Miller, Emanuelle Oliveira; professors in the English department including: Colin Dayan, Teresa Goddu, Sean Goudie, Dana Nelson, Ifeoma Nwankwo; and, professors in the Anthropology department: William Fowler and Steve Wernke.

Related Resources on Campus

Black Atlantic History Seminar
Each February the History Department sponsors a Black Atlantic History Seminar to showcase the work of Vanderbilt faculty and that of major scholars in the field.  Additional support for the series has come from the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities, The Program in African American and Diaspora Studies and The Bishop Johnson Black Cultural Center.

Past speakers have included Madison Smartt Bell, prize-winning author of the trilogy on the Haitian Revolution, Philip Morgan, Johns Hopkins University, prize-winning author of Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century  Chesapeake & Lowcountry and Mariza de Carvalho Soares, of the Universidade Federal Fluminense in Rio de Janeiro and prize-winning author of Devotos da Cor.

In 2007 the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities assumed full support for this series and  our special guest was  Philip Morgan,  Professor of History, Johns Hopkins University and author of the prize-winning  Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century  Chesapeake & Lowcountry Slave.

Circum-Atlantic Studies Working Group
In 2002, Sean Goudie (English) and Jane Landers (History) created the CASWG with funding from the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities. Now in its sixth year, this group meets monthly to read and discuss works-in-progress authored by participants. Participants' scholarship is interdisciplinary in nature, focusing on at least two of the following regions-Africa, Europe, Latin and Central America, the Caribbean, and North America-and treating some aspect of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, colonialism, and/or post colonialism. Current seminar coordinator: jane.landers@vanderbilt.edu

Departmental and Center Speakers on Atlantic World
The History Department regularly hosts speakers on the Atlantic World, as do other programs and Centers across campus. Some of our past speakers have included: Daniel Richter, history, McNeil Center for Early American Studies, U of Pennsylvania, Facing East from Indian Country (Cambridge, 2001); The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization (Chapel Hill, 1992), andNatalie Zacek, history & American Studies, U of Manchester.

Related Centers
Vanderbilt University is also home to a number of exciting interdisciplinary programs that promote curriculum and programming related to Atlantic World History. These include:

The American Studies Program

The Bishop Johnson Black Cultural Center

The Brazilian Studies Association

The Center for the Americas

The Center for European Studies

The Center for Latin American and Iberian Studies

Center for the Study of Religion and Culture

The Program in African American and Diaspora Studies

Undergraduate courses in Atlantic World History

258   Rise of the Iberian Atlantic Empires, 1492-1700
259   Decline of the Iberian Atlantic Empires, 1700-1820
260   Caribbean History, 1492-1983
261   Colonial Mexico
263   History of Gender and Women in Colonial Latin America
264   Brazilian Civilization
267   North American Colonial History
268   English Atlantic World, 1500-1688
269   Cultural History of the First British Empire, 1707-1783
286   Gender, Sexuality, and Race in Early American Culture, 1600-1865
295   Topics over recent years have included:
         Comparative Slavery
         The Caribbean Since 1945
         New Worlds, New Bodies
         Picturing Race
         New World Slavery
         Indians in Eastern North America
         Slavery and Abolition

Graduate courses in Atlantic World History

359   Atlantic World History, 15th to the 19th c
360   Studies in Imperialism and the Colonial Other
361   Topics in Latin American History
362   History of Gender and Women in Colonial Latin America
365   Seminar in Latin American History
371   Studies in Early American History to 1783

 

Graduate Studies at Vanderbilt
History of the American South

--Currier and Ives, 1884, after William Aiken Walker, The Big B Cotton Plantation

As one of the American South’s preeminent institutions of higher learning, Vanderbilt has long been a major center for scholarship in the region’s history and culture.  A particular strong suit of our current program is the interest of our faculty in exploring the nature of region in its broadest context, and particularly at its margins.  The work of such scholars as Jane Landers on the South as part of a “greater Caribbean” integrates the history of southern slavery with the larger history of Plantation America and the African diaspora, and forges links to Vanderbilt’s important Latin American and Iberian Studies Program and the University’s new Center for the Americas.  Similarly, our African-American scholars, Richard J. M. Blackett, Brandi Brimmer, Dennis C. Dickerson, and Devin Fergus, integrate the study of southern African-Americans and the Civil Rights movement into larger structures of religious and labor history and the study of reform movements in the Atlantic world.  Daniel Usner has done groundbreaking work on the interaction of red, white, and black folk on the early southwestern frontier, and ranks as one of our leading scholars of southern Native Americans.   David L. Carlton’s work on the industrialization of the South explores the region’s peculiar path to the modern world in both a national and a global context–in the process connecting with the work of other economic and business historians in both the History and Economics departments.  Finally, our newest member, Catherine Molineux,  looks at all of British America from an imperial perspective, using innovative critical tools to analyze how the metropole went about imagining the world of its periphery.

Beyond the Department, Vanderbilt can boast the presence of Michael Kreyling (English), one of the most prominent southern literary critics, and Dale Cockrell (Music), whose pathbreaking work on American popular musical culture offers a bridge to the cultural riches of Nashville, notably the vast collections of the Country Music Hall of Fame.  Those with an interest in the religious history of the region can benefit from our close proximity to the Vanderbilt Divinity School and from the nearby collections of the Disciples of Christ Historical Society and the Southern Baptist Historical Library and Archives.  Vanderbilt is also encouraging the interdisciplinary study of religion through its new Center for the Study of Religion and Culture.

Graduate Studies at Vanderbilt
History of Medicine

-- Thomas Eakins, The Gross Clinic, 1875, Collections of the Jefferson Medical College of Thomas Jefferson University, Philadelphia.

Graduate students in History can do a major or minor field in the history of medicine or the history of science and medicine.  Minor fields are also available in such related areas as medical anthropology, medical sociology, and bioethics.

Work in medical history at Vanderbilt benefits from the contributions of multiple units both within and outside the University and from a commitment to developing interdisciplinary studies of health and health care.  Five faculty members in the Department of History teach and do research in the field.   Dennis C. Dickerson works on the history of African-American medical practitioners. Elizabeth Lunbeck, formerly at Princeton University, joined the department in the fall of 2006.  She is a historian of medicine, science, and gender, with a particular interest in the history of psychiatry and psychoanalysis.   Matthew Ramsey studies the political, social, economic, and cultural forces that shaped medicine and public health in modern Europe, with an emphasis on late eighteenth and nineteenth century France.   Ruth Rogaski examines the connections between medicine and modernity in nineteenth and twentieth-century China.  Arleen Tuchman, in her work on the rise of scientific medicine in western industrialized countries, explores changing and contested meanings about gender, the body, and scientific knowledge.  Other faculty members with health-related interests can be found in Anthropology, Classical Studies, Economics, English, French and Italian, Germanic and Slavic Languages, Philosophy, Religious Studies, Sociology, and Spanish and Portuguese.

Students in medical history can join  the Vanderbilt Center for Medicine, Health, and Society, founded in 2003 by Matthew Ramsey and currently directed by Arleen Tuchman.  The CMHS has more than 300 affiliates from all of Vanderbilt’s nine schools and colleges, other colleges and universities in Middle Tennessee, and the Nashville area health care community.  Although they come from a range of disciplines, they share an interest in studying health and health care in their social and cultural contexts.  The Center sponsors seminars, workshops, lectures, and conferences and is developing a new interdisciplinary M.A. program.   In addition, the Vanderbilt Institute for Public Policy Studies includes a Center for Health Policy.

A major advantage for the study of medical history at Vanderbilt is the close proximity of two medical schools -- Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, located adjacent to the main Vanderbilt campus, and Meharry Medical College, situated less than two miles from Vanderbilt.  They are formally linked through the Meharry-Vanderbilt Alliance. The History of Medicine Society at Vanderbilt Medical School sponsors monthly talks and the annual R. Turner Simpson Lecture in the History of Medicine.

Vanderbilt and Nashville are rich in resources for the researcher in medical history.  At Vanderbilt, the Eskind Biomedical Library Special Collections comprise the Historical Collection (located in the History of Medicine Room on the third floor of the library) and the Archives of the Vanderbilt University Medical Center.  The Historical Collection contains over 14,000 books on the history of medicine and nursing, a collection of medical instruments, manuscript collections of prominent figures in the institution's history and leaders in the field of nutrition, and thousands of photographs documenting the history of Vanderbilt Medical School. The Eskind Library is located on Garland Avenue, near the Vanderbilt Hospital. For additional information, contact the Special Collections Librarian, Mary Teloh.  The Meharry Medical College Information Center Library houses the college archives, materials relating to racial and ethnic minority health and health disparities, and  the Evelyn Tomes Black Nursing Collection.  For more information , contact the Archives Assistant, Barbara Grissom.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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