Workshop Archive

MRP Workshop Papers

 

Year 1

Fall 2010: Why the Mediterranean? (UC Santa Cruz, 8 October)

  • Sharon Kinoshita, (Literature: University of California Santa Cruz), “Locating the Medieval Mediterranean”
  • Brian A. Catlos, (History: University of California Santa Cruz /Religious Studies, University of Colorado at Boulder), “Conveniencia” or “the Convenience Principle: A Model for Ethno-Religious Interaction in the Medieval Mediterranean”
  • Fred Astren (Jewish Studies: San Francisco State University), “Shadows of Jews in the Early Medieval Muslim Conquests: A Mediterranean Perspective”
  • Keynote Address: David Abulafia (Cambridge University), “Mediterranean History as Global History”

 

Winter 2011: Mediterranean Court Cultures (UC Santa Barbara, 18 February)

  • Jonathan Decter (Jewish Studies, Brandeis University), “Before Caliphs and Kings: Jewish Courtiers in Medieval Iberia”
  • Jocelyn Sharlet (Comparative Literature, UC Davis) “All the Right Stuff: Gift Exchange, Competing Values, and the Political Elite in Medieval Arabic Literature”
  • Amy Aisen Kallender (History, Syracuse University) “Disentangling Family from State: France and Tunisia in the Nineteenth Century”

 

Spring 2011: Mediterranean Empires (UC Davis, 8 April)

  • Emily Albu (Classics, UC Davis), “Mediterranean Lands and the Peutinger Map”
  • Jessica Ambler (Ph.D. Candidate, History of Art and Architecture, UC Santa Barbara),
”The City Represented: Colonia Concordia Iulia Karthago and Roman Remembering”
  • E. Cihan Yüksel Muslu (Historical Studies, University of Texas at Dallas), “Legacies of Exchange and Conflict: The Letter of a Prisoner”
  • Keynote Address: Cornell Fleischer (Kanuni Suleyman Professor of Ottoman and Modern Turkish Studies, University of Chicago),
”The New Language of Empire in the Sixteenth-Century Mediterranean”

 

Year 2

Fall 2011: Mediterranean Empires (UC Los Angeles, 28 October)

  • David Wacks (Spanish, University of Oregon), “Reading Amadís in Constantinople: the Sephardic as Imperial Abject”
  • Claire Gilbert (Ph.D. Candidate, History, UCLA), “Language Liquidity in Empire”
  • Christopher Chase-Dunn (Sociology and Director the Institute for Research on World Systems, UC Riverside), w/ Anthony Roberts, Alexis Alvarez, Kirk Lawrence, and Hiroko Inoue, “Empire Upsweeps: Semiperipheral Development in the Mediterranean World”
  • Keynote Address: Christophe Picard (History, Université de Paris I) “The Mediterranean versus the Indian Ocean: Representations of the Seas in Arabic Geography at Bagdad (IXth C.)”

 

Winter 2012: The Maritime Mediterranean (UC San Diego, 3 February)

  • Tatiana Sizonenko (Ph.D. Candidate, Art History, UC San Diego), “The Maritime Mediterranean: A Case of Shared Venetian, Byzantine, and Islamic Iconographies in Fashioning Early Modern Imperial Authority”
  • Megan Moore (Assistant Professor, French, University of Missouri), “The Maritime Mediterranean in Medieval Literature: Seas of Commerce, Exchanges of Knowledge”
  • Joshua White (Ph. D. Candidate, History, University of Michigan), “The View from the Breach: Piracy, Diplomacy, and Law in the Early Modern Mediterranean”
  • Plenary Lecture: Nabil Matar (History and English, University of Minnesota), “The Mediterranean in Arabic Sources in the Early Modern Period”

 

Spring 2012: …Can We Talk Mediterranean? (University of Colorado at Boulder, 6 April)

  • Eric Dursteler (History, Brigham Young University), “Language and Identity in the Early Modern Mediterranean”
  • Neil Doshi (French, University of Pittsburgh), “Materiality, Modernity, and the Dialectics of Reading in the Modern Mediterranean”
  • Jeffrey Miner (History, Stanford University), “Law, Identity and Membership in the Genoese Mediterranean”
  • Keynote Address: Perergine Horden (Royal Holloway), “Mediterranean connectivities: a comparative approach”

 

Year 3

Fall 2012: Excavating the Mediterranean Past (UC Santa Barbara, 9 November)

  • Luca Zavagno (Visiting Research Fellow, Stanley J. Seeger Hellenic Center, Princeton), “Two Hegemonies, One Island: Cyprus between the Byzantines and the Umayyads (650-850 A.D.)”
  • Nikki Malain (Graduate Student, History, UC Santa Barbara), “Predators and praeda: The Logistics of Piracy in the Twelfth-century Mediterranean”
  • Karen R. Mathews (Research Assistant Professor, Art & Art History, University of Miami), “Anxiety of Origins: Shifting Conceptions of the Past in Genoese Historical Chronicles and Civic Architecture of the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries”
  • Keynote Address: Marcus Milwright (Professor, History of Art, University of Victoria, British Columbia), “Archaeology and the Study of Traditional Urban Crafts in the Islamic Mediterranean”

 

Winter 2013: Gendering the Mediterranean (UC Los Angeles, 2 February)

  • Carol Lansing (Professor of History, UC Santa Barbara), “Captive Women in the Eastern Mediterranean in the Later Middle Ages”
  • Erith Jaffe-Berg (Associate Professor of Theater, UC Riverside), “Mediterranean Cartographies of Sixteenth-Century Commedia dell’ Arte Actresses”
  • Lucia Carminati (Graduate Student, Middle Eastern and North African Studies, University of Arizona), “Egypt 1919: Working-class Cosmopolitanism and Shifting Boundaries of Belonging”
  • Keynote Address: Michael Herzfeld (Ernest E. Monrad Professor of the Social Sciences, Harvard University), “Gender, Geography, and the Imagining of the Mediterranean”

 

Spring 2013: The Mediterranean and Maritime Perspectives (UC Santa Cruz, 4 May)

  • Brian Sandberg (History, Northern Illinois University), “‘Moors Must Not be Taken for Black’: Islamic / French Cultural Translations Across the Early Modern Mediterranean”
  • Maria Evangelatou (History of Art & Visual Culture, UC Santa Cruz), “The Hand of the Master: Thoughts on the Self-Perception of Icon Painters, from Byzantium to El Greco”
  • Peter Cowe (History, UC Los Angeles), “The Changing Interface between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean from Medieval to Early Modern Times as a Key Factor in the Dynamic Reconfiguration of the Network of Armenian Trade Colonies”
  • Keynote Lecture: William Granara (Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, Harvard), “Rethinking Pirenne: Facile Divides, Historical Complexities, and the Possibilities of Cross-cultural Conflict”

 

Year 4

Fall 2013: Translating the Mediterranean (UC Berkeley, 16 November)

  • S. J. Pearce (Spanish & Portuguese, New York University), “Cide Hamete at the Bodleian and the Beinecke: The Fictional Arabic Translators Talk Back”
  • Mona El-Sherif (Modern Languages and Literatures, University of Miami), “Nineteenth-Century Arabic Translations of the Mediterranean: From Shaykh to Translator and the Development of Secular Narratives in renaissance Arabic Literature”
  • Jonathan Haddad (French, UC Berkeley), “Churning kaymak into vin: Jean de Laroque and the Turkish Republic of Letters, 1732-38”
  • Keynote Lecture: Karla Mallette (Italian and Near Eastern Studies, University of Michigan), “Against Translation: The Cosmopolitan Language as Literary Medium”

 

Winter 2014: Minorities in the Mediterranean (San Francisco State University, 8 March)

  • Giovanna Montenegro (Comparative Literature, University of California, Davis), “Do Mediterranean Studies Speak to Latin American Colonial Studies? A Suspected German Lutheran Conquers A Suspected ‘Morisco’ in the Canaries Before Taking On the New World”
  • Dan Selden (Literature, University of California, Santa Cruz), “Minoritarian Poetics: Ethnicity and Literature in Ptolemaic Alexandria”
  • Jocelyn Sharlet (Comparative Literature, University of California, Santa Barbara), “Arabic Poets, Minority/Marginal Religious Affiliations, and Political Power: 500-1000 CE”
  • Keynote Lecture: Stephen Humphreys (History, University of California, Santa Barbara), “Adapting to the Infidel: the Christian Communities of Syria in the Early Islamic Period”

 

Spring 2014: Mediterranean Connectivities (Loyola Marymount University, 3 May)

  • Travis Bruce (Assistant Professor of History, Wichita State University), “Commercial Conflict Resolution Across the Religious Divide in the Thirteenth-Century Mediterranean”
  • Sergio La Porta (Haig and Isabel Berberian Professor of Armenian Studies, California State University, Fresno), “Conceptualizing Cultural Interaction in Twelfth-Century Eastern Anatolia”
  • Jessica Marglin (Assistant Professor of Judaic Studies, University of Michigan), “The Extraterritorial Mediterranean: Consular Courts and Connectivity in Nineteenth-Century Morrocco”
  • Keynote Lecture: Adam Sabra (Professor of History and King Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud Chair in Islamic Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara), “Mediterranean Connections of a Sixteenth-Century Egyptian àlim”

 

Year 5

Fall 2014: Land and Sea in the Mediterranean World (UC Santa Barbara, 8 November)

  • Daniel Hershenzon (Spanish, University of Connecticut), “The Political Economy of Ransom in the Early Modern Mediterranean, 1600-1650” with Comment by Cristelle Baskins (Art History, Tufts University)
  • Claudio Fogu (Italian Studies, UC Santa Barbara), “From the Southern to the Mediterranean Question: Making Italians and the Suppression of Mediterranenan-ness” with Comment by Pamela Ballinger, (History, Cuny Professor of the History of Human Rights, University of Michigan)
  • Susan Slyomovics (Anthropology and Near Eastern Cultures, UC Los Angeles), “Moving War Memorials from Algeria to France” with Comment by Sharon Kinoshita (Literature, UC Santa Cruz; Co-Director for the UC Multicampus Research Project in Mediterranean Studies)

 

Winter 2015: Trade and Exchange (UC Davis, 30 January)

  • Fariba Zarinebaf (History/Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, UC Riverside), “Ottoman-European Commercial Encounters in Early Modern Galata” with Comment by Cornel Zwierlein (Environmental History, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany & Visiting Fellow, Harvard University)
  • Nir Shafir (History, UCLA), “Damascus as Pilgrimage Center: Saints, Shrines, and the Hajj between ʿArab and Rūm in the Seventeenth Century” with Comment by Joshua M. White (History, University of Virginia)
  • Daniel Vitkus (Literature, UC San Diego), “Cross-Cultural Trade, the Early Corporation, and the English Theater: Staging the Origins of Capitalism in the Early Modern Mediterranean” with Comment by Zahit Atcil (Newberry Library)
  • Keynote Lecture: Molly Greene (History, Princeton), “Where are the Ottomans in Mediterranean History?”

 

Spring 2015: Borders (UC San Diego, 18 April)

  • Claire Gilbert (History, Saint Louis University), “The King, the Coin, and the Word: Imagining and Enacting Castilian Frontiers in the Early Modern Mediterranean” with Comment by Fariba Zarinebaf (History, UC Riverside)
  • Aaron Stamper (History/Religious Studies, CU Boulder), “The Córdoba y Válor: A Legacy of Dissidence in Morisco Granada”, with Comment by Baki Tezcan (History and Religious Studies, UC Davis)
  • John Dagenais (Spanish & Portuguese, UCLA), “All the King’s Horses and All the King’s Men: Putting Anselm-Abdullah Together Again” with Comment by Sergio La Porta (Armenian Studies, CSU Fresno)
  • Keynote Lecture: Mercedes García-Arenal (CSIC, Madrid) “Comparing Minorities of Converso Origin in Early Modern Spain: Uses of Language, Writing and Translation”