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The purpose of the collaborative research project entitled TRACS (for Transatlantic Cultures. Cultural Histories of the Atlantic World 18th-21st Centuries) is to create a Digital Platform for Transatlantic Cultural History, i.e. a digital online encyclopaedia and, ultimately, to produce an interconnected history of the contemporary Atlantic Area in order to analyze the cultural relations of these past two centuries between Europe, Africa and the Americas in an interdisciplinary perspective associating historians, anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, specialists of literature, visual arts, theatre and cinema. Reflecting the most recent research and debates, the project also engages the question of transatlantic circulations and cultural globalization as well as the process of identification and the role of borders – political, linguistic, cultural, symbolic – which contributed to the creation and the reshaping of major cultural areas since the 18th century. To do so, we will discuss three majors aspects: the very meaning – and borders – of the Atlantic Area; the temporality of its history that extents way beyond the modern era; the objects and the specificity of cultural history – that deals with the social history of representantions, habits and symbolic productions – in view of geopolitical perspectives and Cultural Studies in general.