Mediterranean and Middle Eastern Network [2009-2011]

About

The research group provides a forum for scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds working on the Middle East and Mediterranean to discuss their research. This is a region that has known longstanding exchanges across borders and seas, languages and religions, in literature and music, politics and science and our activities reflect this diversity of exchange. Our activities enable staff and graduate students from different faculties to meet and share research interests which cover many different aspects of Mediterranean and Middle Eastern societies.

Seminar Series 2010-11

Mare Nostrum: perspectives around the Great White Central Sea.

This year’s seminar series will create a forum for scholars to confront, explore and/or challenge the now ubiquitous concept of ‘Mediterraneanism’, as a useful category of inquiry.  Cultural anthropologists; intellectual, literary, economic, political and art historians; ethnobiologists; geographers and musicologists have all appropriated the term – with varying levels of success – in an attempt to examine the shared (or otherwise) characteristics of the societies of that region throughout time.  How far might the ‘Mediterranean’ extend beyond its shoreline and its port cities before the designation spreads so thin as to be meaningless?  To what extent might Mediterraneanism be a helpful way to focus discussions about dissemination of goods, flora, fauna, art, ideas and literature between, for example, Baghdad and Paris?

In order to give shape to our discussions, we will take up a range of broad themes throughout the year including magic and popular medicine, the memory and re-presentation of Antiquity, the anthropology of curiosity collections, the economy and sociology of port cities and the examination of reading practices and writerly culture.  The seminars will involve presentations by two scholars working in different disciplinary traditions with overlapping interest in a particular theme of the series.  This will be followed by a response from the discussant and then questions from the participants.  Presenting scholars may offer preparatory reading lists before the seminars.