Our Mission

Our contemporary world makes increasingly visible that the modern nation is both an ideological and historical construct. The rise of international economic and political blocs like Mercosur, CARICOM, and the Free Trade Area of the Americas; the constraints imposed on individual nations by international financial institutions such as the World Bank and the World Trade Organization; and the United States’s pre-emptive military interventions against sovereign nations: all of these have forced historians to consider the centrality of transnationalism to the history of the modern nation state. Scholars of transnational phenomena foreground the circulation of people, culture, and capital operating on registers both greater and smaller than the nation state. Much of the recent debate around "globalization" views it as a new phenomenon, but the origins of this global order stretch back at least to the nineteenth century, and arguably to the sixteenth-century emergence of global capitalism. This institute will grapple with the roots of the new global order through the collaborative creation of transnational histories of the Americas.

Students in graduate programs mostly continue to receive country- and region-specific training and don't have adequate exposure to transnational history. Added to these impediments, North and Latin American scholarly communities have few opportunities for dialogue, and the rhythm of work at international conferences does not make for fruitful dialogue. This Institute will facilitate an intensive dialogue between North American and Latin American graduate students and junior and senior faculty members.