After an opening session given over to personal introductions, organizational details, and general orientation to the seminar, the group will spend an afternoon becoming acquainted with the University of Virginia’s library facilities at their disposal. On the following morning, the director will move into substantive matters by introducing the non-Africanists to the methodological challenges of understanding primary evidence available to understand people in Africa who seldom wrote, with a sketch of historical dynamics there before the seventeenth century. In the afternoon, the group will return to the UVA Grounds for introductions to the Robertson Media Center and Web- and other technology-based programs (http://www.vcdh.virginia.edu/index.php?page=VCDH, http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/).
On Wednesday the seminar participants will take the lead in confronting one another’s respective regional fields, with a morning session devoted to considering how Africanists might “translate Africa” into terms relevant and accessible to their colleagues working on other parts of the Atlantic world, and vice versa – how Americanists might “translate world/Atlantic history into Africa”. On Thursday morning the director will extend the historical survey to “West Africa in the Atlantic era”, the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries – the years of growing global integration that are of primary concern to the seminar. Friday will be left unscheduled to allow participants to confer with the director regarding the individual research they plan to conduct during the weeks to follow and to explore the resources that they have found of potential interest to their own projects.