The UNCG Atlantic World Research Network (AWRN) is a campus initiative which fosters campus-wide interdisciplinary research, teaching, and creative work that reflects on the peoples, cultures, and ecologies of the “Atlantic Rim”—Africa, Europe, and the Americas. The Network provides leadership in transatlantic studies not only at UNCG and around our region, but around the Atlantic Rim and around the world. With partners from Britain, Spain and Brazil to Italy, France and Denmark, to the Folger Institute on Capitol Hill and the American Shakespeare Center in Staunton, Virginia, this far-flung interdisciplinary network embraces Atlantic World work in the Humanities, Arts, Sciences, and Social Sciences.
Since September 2004, AWRN has hosted more than a dozen successful conferences and symposia, including four of the largest international, interdisciplinary Atlantic World conferences to date, which between them brought together 800 participants at UNCG and in Greensboro. In fall 2007, 2008, 2011, 2013, 2014, 2017, and 2022, the AWRN co-organized seven further conferences on the poet George Herbert’s life and cultural legacies—the first in Salisbury/Bemerton, England, the second here at UNCG, the third at Gregynog Conference Centre in Wales, the fourth at Grove City College in Pennsylvania, the fifth in Tempe, Arizona, the sixth at the Sorbonne in Paris, and the seventh at Cambridge University. In March of 2012, AWRN co-sponsored, at the University of Edinburgh, a symposium on “Atlantic World Rhetorics,” which brought together three rhetoricians from UNCG with six from Britain. All of these programs have registered a combined attendance of over 1600, with 200 panels presenting over 600 papers, and featured 60 plenary speakers—with twelve poetry readings, six choral concerts, four rare book displays, two dramatic presentations, four books of published proceedings, and one other book in progress. AWRN conferences have included registrants from 46 U.S. states, Mexico, Canada, the UK, France, The Netherlands, Italy, Denmark, Finland, Iran, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan.
Director:
Dr. Christopher Hodgkins 2004 –