Carolina Lowcountry and Atlantic World
The Carolina Lowcountry and Atlantic World (CLAW) Program at the College of Charleston promotes scholarship and public engagement with the history and culture of the Lowcountry region, the Atlantic World and the connections between the two.
The Carolina Lowcountry is a vibrant crossroads where stories from Africa, Europe, the Caribbean and the Americas come together. CLAW reveals the interwoven connections of these diverse cultures, societies and ethnicities and encourages the ongoing dialogue and scholarly study of the shared history that binds them.
What we do
We partner with local, national and international organizations to host or co-sponsor events around Charleston.
- Conferences
- Symposia
- Public lectures
- Faculty seminar sessions
- Film screenings
- Other public programming
Through our partnership with the University of South Carolina Press, we publish books on diverse topics related to Atlantic World experiences.
Our faculty and affiliates of CLAW work with cultural heritage organizations to support physical and digital exhibitions that promote educational outreach.
Upcoming Events2026 Hines Prize Winner
The Carolina Lowcountry and Atlantic World Program (CLAW) at the College of Charleston is pleased to announce that Dr. Grant Kleiser received the O. Vernon Burton prize for the best paper presented at a CLAW conference. Dr. Kleiser’s presented his winning paper, “Monte Cristi and the Massacre River in an Era of Franco-Spanish Peace,” at the May 2026 conference, which was hosted in collaboration with the Consortium on the Revolutionary Era.
Dr. Keliser’s work focuses on the local violence along the borderlands between Spanish Santo Domingo and French Saint-Domingue plagued the colonial history of the island of Hispaniola throughout much of the eighteenth century. Particularly intriguing about these conflicts was the fact that Bourbon monarchs sat on both Spanish and French thrones, and these cousins signed several so-called “family pacts” that ostensibly made them allies, including during the War of the Austrian Succession that subsumed the War of Jenkins’ Ear during the 1740s. His work argues that this understudied local fissure in the Bourbon alliance had several significant knock-on effects. In part to help stem the tide of French borderland invasions, Spanish authorities permitted the port of Monte Cristi to engage in foreign trade to supply a local loyal buffer population. British North-American merchants, in particular, flocked to this port and its vibrant commercial opportunities with Spanish and French settlers. Even though Spanish officials shut down this “free port” when Spain entered the Seven Years War in 1762, these Anglo-Americans would not forget such a lucrative entrepôt. Indeed, the memory of Monte Cristi lingered in many of their minds after the British Parliament created its own, much more restricted, Caribbean free ports in 1766. Such disappointment over Britain’s failed replacement of Monte Cristi would only intensify as 1776 approached.
Grant Kleiser is a Ph.D. History Graduate from Columbia University studying the early modern Atlantic world. His areas of research include contraband, political economy, commercial reforms, intellectual history, the history of slavery, the American Revolution, and inter-imperial relations. He is currently working on a monograph, under contract with Penn Press, that analyzes the emergence and effects of the British, French, and Spanish Caribbean “free-port” movement during the second half of the eighteenth century. It will detail this phenomenon's impact on the American Revolution, the establishment of the United States, and slavery and freedom-seeking in the wider Atlantic world. Grant Kleiser currently works at Trinity School in New York City as a global history teacher.
Learn More About the Hines PrizeCall for Submissions - 2027 Hines Prize
The Hines Prize is awarded to the best book manuscript relating to any aspect of the Carolina Lowcountry and/OR the Atlantic World. Early career scholars will be prioritized. The prize carries a cash award of $1,000 and preferential consideration by the University of South Carolina Press for the CLAW Program's book series.
If you have a manuscript on a topic pertaining to the Carolina Lowcountry and/or Atlantic World, please send a copy to CLAW Director Sandra Slater, slaters@cofc.edu, before May 15, 2027. If you have graduate students with potential manuscripts that could contend for the Prize, please make sure that they know of this biennial opportunity.
Submit a Manuscript