“Turning Points” Winter 2019 Mediterranean Seminar Workshop
Paper proposals and round-table participants are being sought for the Mediterranean Seminar’s two-day Winter 2019 Meeting, to be held at the Princeton University on 1 & 2 March 2019 on the subject “Turning Points,” sponsored by Princeton University’s Department of History
Through its “provincialization” of the northwestern-European-centric historical meta-narrative and its rejection of teleological and Providential approaches Mediterranean Studies has provoked a reassessment of the geographic and culture framework through which the pre-Modern west has traditionally been approached. In this view can be seen as the central locus of an array of historical and cultural processes involving Christian, Islamic and Jewish cultures, and European, West and Central Asian and African societies. The interdisciplinary approach of Mediterranean Studies has further undermined the universality of these paradigms, by moving beyond political history and history of formal institutions as the markers of historical change. At this workshop we investigate the implications of Mediterranean Studies vis-a-vis chronology, and temporal divisions, examining “turning points” in the Mediterranean and the broader Abrahamic West, and interrogating widely held suppositions regarding periodization in terms of both research and teaching. The recent move in the US to eliminate medieval and antique history (pre-1450) from the AP Global History requirement and the Medieval Academy’s formal response, reflect the timeliness and importance of this issue.
For the workshop (to be held on Friday, 1 March), we invite abstracts of in-progress drafts of articles or book/dissertation chapters on any aspect of historical, cultural, or historiographical “turning points” in the Antique, pre-Modern or Modern Mediterranean, broadly construed, Mediterranean turning points and … READ MORE