During the Age of Revolutions (c. 1770-1830), Europe and the Americas were convulsed by a wave of interrelated political upheavals, social protests, slave rebellions, and wars. Republican alternatives to monarchies proliferated, even as colonial wars and abolitionist insurrections shook even the most entrenched empires. As a result, hundreds of thousands of people found themselves displaced and dispersed across the Atlantic world. While some chose to leave out of political or religious principle, others were forced out by some combination of ideological persecution, economic dislocation, and armed conflict. Wherever they ended up, the uprooted were forced to negotiate foreign and often hostile cultures and asylum practices. Drawing together historians and scholars of the literary, visual, and musical arts, this workshop aims to shed light on the least-visible members of these diasporas —women, children and servants— and to develop interdisciplinary perspectives on familial constellations of exile.
