Translation and Transmission in the Early Americas: The Fourth Early Americanist ‘Summit’

Washington DC and the University of Maryland, 2–5 June, 2016 Traduttore, traitore; translatio studii; translatio imperii. The matter of translation is central to the study of the histories, literatures, and cultures of the early Americas, where speakers of indigenous, Indo-European, African, and Asian languages negotiated what words meant and who had the power to wield them. From nuanced accommodations… Read More

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Familiar Sources and Forgotten Colonies

WMQ author Justin Roberts reflects on the unexpected route that led him to the article on British plantation management in Barbados that appears in the April issue. by Justin Roberts As I was writing my first book about British Atlantic plantation management in the late eighteenth century, I found myself burrowing back further in time with my research questions. As I… Read More

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The Five-Reader Problem

by Josh Piker It will, I suspect, come as no surprise to hear that the relationship between authors and those scholars who serve as readers for article manuscripts is an ambivalent one.  I try to recruit five readers’ reports for each essay that goes out for peer review.  A not insignificant part of my job consists of finding ways… Read More

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“Coming Home”

Fissiparous.  Centrifugal.  Pluralization.  A-synthetic. Comes to find that when I blog about #vastearlyamerica, my inbox fills up with fifty-cent words. Each of those words captures potential consequences of the expansive nature of our field.  Fragmentation, dispersal, diversity, scale, incoherence.  I’ve been hearing a lot about these topics since “Getting Lost?” was posted a few months… Read More

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