In recent decades, transoceanic approaches have transformed the study of culture, literature, media, history, and the arts. Scholars working across the Atlantic, Pacific, Indian Ocean, Mediterranean, Caribbean, and other maritime spaces have challenged the territorial assumptions of area studies and national literatures.

This seminar asks a simple but far-reaching question: What methods do we use to study across oceans? What forms of evidence, comparison, scale, mobility, translation, circulation, connectivity, and discontinuity become visible when scholarly inquiry is organized around bodies of water?

Without limiting itself to any particular geography, period, discipline, or scholarly tradition, this seminar welcomes contributions that reflect on the methodological possibilities and challenges of transoceanic research. We invite scholars whose work purposefully examines oceanic, maritime, archipelagic, or aquatic spaces, as well as those interested in broader questions of mobility, circulation, and connection across bodies of water.

Our goal for the seminar is to learn and comprehend different rigorous and heterodoxal methods to the study of culture across maritime spaces. Although we, the organizers, are scholars of the Spanish- and Portuguese- speaking worlds, we welcome methodological contributions –from any historical period and a wide range of disciplines– that directly reflect on the questions, the possibilities, and also the pitfalls and challenges, by way of specific case studies or examples, of working transoceanically.