Call for Seminar Participants: ‘The Global Mediterranean’
We are seeking participants for a two-hour seminar session on ‘The Global Mediterranean’. Participants will write and circulate short papers (3,000 words) in advance. The seminar will consist of a moderated discussion amongst participants (with part of the session open to questions from the audience).
This seminar will place the early modern history of the Mediterranean in its global context. As Dominic Thomas has written, ‘The Mediterranean has emerged as a privileged site for exploring global dynamics, containing both proximity and distance, constituting a link but also an obstacle and a barrier.’ How was this intensely connected region integrated into global patterns, systems, and networks? How might we balance our histories of the local and particular with a consideration of interdependency and entanglement between the Mediterranean and the wider world?
The Mediterranean, a ‘liquid continent’, has long served as a case study of the patterns of connectivity, transnationalism, and hybridity that have characterized global history. But the contemporary crisis in the Mediterranean has also required us to think more carefully about how the Mediterranean Sea itself has operated historically as a global crucible for diaspora, dissymmetry, and precarity. Social scientists of contemporary Mediterranean migration have emphasized the fraught nature of Mediterranean mobility; and the ways in which diaspora and migration create fragile, ever-forming and ever-dissipating transnational constellations. How might these new ways of thinking migration shape our approaches to a global Mediterranean history? How might these approaches unsettle some of our assumptions about transnational integration and entanglement?
Possible themes and questions include: the integrity of ‘the Mediterranean’ as a unit of analysis, in light of global approaches; the movement of people, including slavery, global migrations, and diaspora; trans-regional integration; the movement of objects/material culture; connections, both empirical and methodological, between Mediterranean, Indian Ocean, and Atlantic world histories; the place of the Mediterranean in global Catholicism; the Mediterranean as a crucible for global empire; the place of early modernity in the formation of a global Mediterranean.
Confirmed participants include Dr. Erin Maglaque (Organizer, Sheffield), Dr. Stefan Hanß (Manchester), Dr. David do Paço (Sciences Po), and Dr. Julia McClure (Glasgow).
Please email Dr. Erin Maglaque with a 100-word abstract and short CV: [email protected].
