The Fall 2023 Mediterranean Seminar Workshop
Friday & Saturday, 3 & 4 November
University of California Santa Cruz
“Mediterranean Studies, Present & Future:
The “California School” Twenty Years On”
From its inception at UC Santa Cruz in 2003, the “California School” of Mediterranean Studies has promoted the Mediterranean not (pace Braudel) as a predefined place of the olive and the vine, but as a heuristic rubric useful for disrupting or reconfiguring existing categories of analysis (especially those defined by nation-states, continents, or religious cultures)—in the process generating new questions and bringing new objects, case studies, or perspectives into focus. Now, two decades on, the Fall 2023 Mediterranean Seminar Workshop will return to UCSC on the 20th anniversary of the foundation of the UCSC Mediterranean Studies Reading Group, the precursor to the Mediterranean Seminar, to take stock of the field and suggest new avenues of research and methodologies. The Mediterranean Seminar invites contributions for our Fall 2023 Workshop that reflect the depth and breadth of Mediterranean Studies and its approaches, whether applied to the Mediterranean itself or adjacent or comparable regions, from the earliest historical period up to today.
Program & Papers
All papers [click on the title to download] are copyright the author and are not to be copied, distributed or cited without express written permission by same.
Click on the participant name to see their bio.
Link to the program calender here.
Friday 4 November 2023
Location: Humanities I 210
9:30—10:00 Coffee and Registration
10:00—10:20 Opening Remarks
• Brian A. Catlos (Religious Studies: University of Colorado Boulder) and Sharon Kinoshita (Literature: UC Santa Cruz), The Mediterranean Seminar
10:20–11:30 Workshop Paper #1
“Trans & Gender Identity in the Premodern Mediterranean” [abstract]
• Michelle Armstrong Partida (History, Emory) and Susan McDonough (History, U of Maryland-Baltimore County)
Moderator: Sharon Kinoshita (Literature: UC Santa Cruz)
Respondent: Carla Freccero (Literature and History of Consciousness, UCSC)
11:30–11:45 Introductions
11:45–12:00 Break
12:00–1:00 “Speculating about Mediterraneans”- A Mediterranean Conversation
• Susan Gillman (Literature, UCSC), author of American Mediterraneans: A Study in Geography, History, and Race(Chicago, 2022)
• Camilla Hawthorne (Sociology and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, UCSC), author of Contesting Race and Citizenship: Youth Politics in the Black Mediterranean (Cornell, 2022)
1:00–2:00 Lunch (for speakers and registered participants)
2:00-3:10 Workshop Paper #2
“Middle Eastern Cosmopolitanism after the Grief: On the Benefits of Generous Uses in Mediterranean Studies” [abstract]
• Idriss Jebari (Near & Middle Eastern Studies, Trinity College, Dublin)
Moderator: Brian A. Catlos (Religious Studies: CU Boulder)
Respondent: Muriam Davis (History, UCSC)
3:10–3:30 Break
3:30–4:45 Workshop Paper #3
“Maghribi Muslims in Medieval Genoa” [abstract]
• Joel Pattison (History, Williams College)
Moderator: Brian A. Catlos (Religious Studies: CU Boulder)
Respondent: Camilo Gómez-Rivas (Literature, UCSC)
4:45–5:00 Coffee Break
5:00–6:00 Keynote Presentation:
“Making the Mamluks Mediterranean: Spolia, Spectacle, and a Shared Visual Culture (1250-1517)” [abstract]
• Karen R. Mathews (Art History, University of Miami)
Moderator: Sharon Kinoshita (Literature: UC Santa Cruz)
6:00–6:30 Reception
light refreshments with participants, faculty, students, donors, and community.
6:30–8:30 Dinner (Alumni Room, University Center, UCSC)
9:30— Post-workshop meeting (see below)
Saturday 5 November 2023
Location: Humanities I 210
9:30–10:00 Coffee and Registration
10:00–11:00 Keynote Presentation:
“Armenian in the Middle: Afterlives of a Language that Lost its Kingdom” [abstract]
• Michael Pifer (Middle East Studies, U of Michigan)
Moderator: Sharon Kinoshita (Literature: UC Santa Cruz)
11:15–12:30 Round Table 1
How does Mediterranean Studies interact with categories configured around other maritime spaces, emerging continental histories, or scales?
Moderator: Brian A. Catlos (Religious Studies: CU Boulder)
• Fred Astren (Emeritus, Jewish Studies, San Francisco SU) “Hen and Rooster in the Mediterranean Longue Durée, or How Jews Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Chicken”
• Jonathan Haddad (Romance Languages, U of Georgia) “Huntington is just a Metro stop in Virginia: A bittersweet farewell to the national security pretext of Mediterranean Studies in the Humanities”
• Edward Holt (History, Grambling) “Poseidon's Oar: Mediterranean Studies in the Global Middle Ages”
• Toby Yuen-Gen Liang (History & Philology, Academia Sinica, Taiwan) “The construction of Mediterranean space and objects from the viewpoint of a Daoist-Buddhist ritual”
• G.S. Sahota (Literature, UCSC) “Amphibious Zones and Planetary Justice: Inter-Areal Studies as Dialectic of Land and Sea”
• Oumelbanine (Nina) Zhiri (Literature, UC San Diego) “Connecting African Studies and Mediterranean Studies. Ahmad Bâbâ al-Timbuktî”
12:30–1:00 The New Thalassology
• Shelly Chan (History, UCSC Transnational China Research Hub) “The Disappeared Nanyang ("South Seas")”
• Nidhi Mahajan (Anthropology, UCSC) “Bodies of Water, Bodies of Knowledge: Between the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean”
• Megan Thomas (Politics, UCSC Center for Southeast Asian Coastal Interactions”) “Maritime Southeast Asia”
1:00–2:00 Lunch (for speakers and registered participants)
2:00–3:15 Round Table 2
How does/should Mediterranean Studies invite conversations or cross-fertilizations between different disciplines?
Moderator: Sharon Kinoshita (Literature: UC Santa Cruz)
• Aliosha Bielenberg (Rhetoric, UC Berkeley) “How does/should Mediterranean Studies invite conversations or cross-fertilizations between different disciplines? A view from Cyprus“
• Veronica Menaldi (Spanish/Modern Languages, Mississippi) “Networking Mediterranean Studies Across Disciplines for Recruitment, Retention, and Outreach”
• Janine Peterson (History, Marist College) “New Technologies for Interdisciplinary Advances in Mediterranean Studies”
• Daniel Selden (Emeritus, Literature, UCSC) “The Afro‐Eurasian World‐System as a Provocation to Mediterranean Studies”
• Elizabeth Terry-Roisin (History, Florida International U) “History: Queen of the Humanities?”
• David Williams (Interdisciplinary Studies, U of Saint Katherine) “How does/should Mediterranean Studies invite conversations or cross-fertilizations between different disciplines?”
3:15–3:45 Coffee Break
3:45–5:00 Round Table 3
How does Mediterranean Studies invite or enable us to re-read, reassess, or re-interpret canonical texts, artifacts and works of art, events and narratives?
Moderator: Brian A. Catlos (Religious Studies: CU Boulder)
• Heather Badamo (Art History, UC Santa Barbara) “Taking Stock of the “Common Culture” Model in Medieval Art History”
• Pamela Ballinger (History, Michigan) “What happens when we add water?”
• Michelle Hamilton (Spanish & Portuguese, Minnesota) “Solomon, jinn, and Brass in Medieval Mediterranean Fiction”
• Núria Silleras-Fernández (Spanish & Portuguese, Colorado-Boulder) “Reassessing the Mediterranean under the Trastámaras: The Cultural Production of Aragonese Naples”
• Will Stroebel (The Modern Greek Program and the Department of Comparative Literature, Michigan) “Re-Reading the Modern Mediterranean”
• David Wacks (Romance Languages, Oregon) “Retelling and re-reading the Hebrew Bible in Medieval Iberia”
5:00–5:30 Concluding Remarks
• Brian A. Catlos & Sharon Kinoshita
7:00—9:00 Dinner (TBA)
Participants:
• Filippo Gianferrar (Literature, University of California Santa Cruz)
• Maureen McGuire (History of Art and Visual Culture, University of California Santa Cruz)
• Megan Moore (Languages, Literatures & Cultures, University of Missouri)
• Vanita Seth (Politics, University of California Santa Cruz)
• Dillon Webster (History, Brown University)
Staff and Administration
• Sadie Lynn (Humanities and History of Consciousness)
• Amy Tessier (Literature)
• Samantha Stringer (Literature)
Sponsors, Organization & Support:
This workshop is organized by Sharon Kinoshita and Brian A. Catlos.
The Fall 2023 workshop is hosted by the University of California, Santa Cruz, sponsored by the Literature Department and the Humanities Division with generous support from the Siegfried B. and Elisabeth Mignon Puknat Endowment for Literary Studies, The Humanities Institute, the Center for the Middle East and North Africa, and the History Department at UCSC, together with the CU Mediterranean Studies Group and the Mediterranean Seminar.