Call for Papers – “Mapping the Mediterranean: Space, Memory, and the Long Road to Modernity” – 11-12 October 2013. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Proposals for papers are being accepted for: “Mapping the Mediterranean: Space, Memory, and the Long Road to Modernity” to be held at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor on 11-12 October 2013.

Keynote Panel: “The Present and Future of Mediterranean Studies”
Yasser Ellhariry*, Dartmouth College*
Gail Holst-Warhaft*, Cornell University*
Sharon Kinoshita*, University of California, Santa Cruz*
Karla Mallette*, University of Michigan (chair)

The Mediterranean served as a site of transit, exchange, and interaction
for well over two millennia, demonstrating tendencies towards both
unification and dispersion. With the onset of modernity, however,
linguistic, ethnic, and national boundaries solidified across the region.
Language, history, memory, and space itself were literally reshaped by the
tools of archaeology, architecture, tourism, mass print, national
education, and transportation.

In recent years, scholarship has begun to excavate past connections and
exchanges that belie our modern conception of the region, mapping out a
diverse – yet united – series of Mediterranean identities centered on the
connecting sea.

Mediterranean Topographies, the University of Michigan’s Interdisciplinary
Workshop on Mediterranean Studies, is pleased to announce its second
conference for graduate students and young faculty. Our symposium attempts
to bring this new model – one that is deeply transnational and
cross-cultural, yet situated primarily within the ancient, pre- and
early-modern periods – into meaningful dialogue with modernity. We will
engage the space of the Mediterranean through the cityscape, as seen
through the lenses of literature, history, anthropology, cultural studies,
architecture, and urban planning. Areas of focus will include (but not be
restricted to):

* cartography and spatiality, city planning and historical narrative,
architecture and collective memory;
* ideologies of the urban, relationships between city and peripheries
(hinterlands, islands, deserts etc.);
* mobility, emigration, immigration, class-stratification, ghettoization,
tourism;
* material history, consumption, trade, manufacturing, commodification,
fashion;
* remembering the city, memoir, nostalgia;
* gendering and queering the city;
* (de)/(re)colonizing the city;
* and, in general, the destruction, re-construction, and re-imagining of
the Mediterranean city space after the spread of nationalism.

Using these foci, we will explore the multiple Mediterraneans that have
been built up and torn down since the onset of modernity. In short, this
symposium will attempt to address the ways in which pre- and early-modern
interconnectivities – both real and imagined – were destroyed, kept alive,
or modulated over the long passage into modernity. Although our focus will
be upon transitions stretching from the early modern to modernity (c. 1500
to today), we nonetheless encourage work that treats these same issues of
urban transformation in the ancient world, especially within a diachronic,
comparative framework. We also encourage contributions that focus on
methodological debates and innovations for mapping and studying
Mediterranean cities.

We seek to bring together work in the humanities, arts, and social
sciences. We invite abstracts ranging from 200-250 words that relate to or
expand upon the topics suggested above. Submissions are especially
encouraged from disciplines such as literature, the history of art,
history, anthropology, sociology, architecture and urbanism, gender and
women’s studies, queer studies, African studies, and religious studies.
Along with your abstract please suggest the category or categories to which
you feel your submission is best suited. Please provide your institutional
affiliation and mailing address, as well as telephone number. Indicate
whether a/v equipment will be needed.

The presentation should be in English, twenty minutes in length (i.e., 10
double-spaced pages) and may address a topic from any relevant period(s) or
discipline(s). Deadline for abstract submission: May 15, 2013.

Please direct questions and submissions to the Meditopos symposium
co-chairs, Harry Kashdan and Will Stroebel, at kashdan@umich.edu and
stroebel@umich.edu.