Lisa West, associate professor of English, was invited to the Transatlantic Conversations workshop held this October at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany. Jointly sponsored by the Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies and the Society of Early Americanists, the workshop brings together scholars from different countries to address a common methodological or theoretical issue in early American Studies.

Participants will share primary archival research and their own work in progress, with the goal of rethinking transnational approaches to early American literature. West will focus on the study of material and visual culture, working with scholars from Canada, Italy, Spain, and the United States. Other groups will work on religion, environmental humanities, periodicals, and medicine.

Within the English Department at Drake, West teaches courses in early American literature and environmental writing. She has recently completed work on early American periodicals, theories of fiction, and early representations of domestic abuse. She also works on early American sense of place, including the way early American antiquities and signs of a cultural past threatened views of an American nature.