The first meeting of the Mediterranean World Workshop will be held on Thursday 1 March at O’Leary’s in DeKalb at 5:15.

The Mediterranean World Workshop is a new group of professors and graduate students interested in Mediterranean history from antiquity to today.  This group is being formed based on common research and teaching interests in Mediterranean studies within the Department of History at Northern Illinois University.  Damián Fernandez studies Iberia and the Mediterranean in late antiquity and teaches courses on the Roman Empire.  Valerie Garver, a Carolingianist, has teaching interests in the expansion of Islam and Christian-Muslim relations in the medieval Mediterranean.  Brian Sandberg does research on the French Mediterranean and teaches on the early modern Mediterranean world.  Ismael Montana studies the trans-Saharan slave trade, North African culture, and the modern Mediterranean.

Our aim is to meet 2 or 3 times per semester to discuss recent work in Mediterranean history, including unpublished works by workshop members.

We will begin by discussing two recent articles on Mediterranean history:

Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, “The Mediterranean and ‘the New Thalassology,'” American Historical Review 111 (June 2006): 722-740.

Walter Scheidel and S. Friesen, “The Size of the Economy and the Distribution of Income in the Roman Empire,” The Journal of Roman Studies 99 (2009): 61-91.

Both of these articles are available through NIU Library databases.

We hope that you will be able to join us for the first meeting of the Mediterranean World Workshop.

best,

Damián Fernández and Brian Sandberg, co-organizers