As the theater of engagement and integration of communities originating on the shores or from the hinterlands of Africa, Asia, and Europe, the Mediterranean region served as a dynamic center of interaction and exchange from Antiquity through early modernity. Even as it began to lose political and economic centrality, it has remained a zone of engagement of diverse peoples and cultures into the Modern era. This engagement is both the product and the catalyst of continuous dialectical processes of translation, transculturation, colonization, and syncretism across the gamut of human experience and expression: in art, literature, language, music, religion, media, material culture, and folk practices, as well as in social, economic, political, and institutional dynamics.
The Winter 2024 Mediterranean Seminar Workshop focuses on the agents (the “go-betweens”) and the currents (the “in-betweens”) of such dialectics. Typically invisible or, at best, marginalized in traditional historiographies and disciplines, intermediaries and middle grounds (synthetic texts, translations, objects, institutions and strategies, and the individuals and communities who were their agents and products) are crucial to the understanding of the history and culture of the Mediterranean, and of the historical processes which gave rise to many aspects of the modern world.
The workshop will also feature two keynote presentations:
Rustam Shukurov (University of St Andrews), Friday
Claire Gilbert (Saint Louis University), Saturday
Registration is free, and is open until 2 February 2024. Please register as soon as possible as numbers are limited.
Registrees commit to attending the whole two-day event.
For general information see for http://www.mediterraneanseminar.org/
For general inquiries, contact mailbox@mediterraneanseminar.org
Sponsor(s): UCLA CMRS Center for Early Global Studies, Center for Near Eastern Studies, Department of Spanish & Portuguese, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, Department of History, Art History