14-Week Residential Research Group
University of California Humanities Research Institute at Irvine
September to December, 2007
Overview
Program
Organizers & Participants
Research & Publication
The intellectual culture of late-nineteenth century northwest Europe has shaped popular and academic notions of the “modern West” as born of Classical roots nourished in England, northern France and Italy, western Germany and the Low Countries. This traditional view, nourished by nationalist intellectual currents which have shaped academia, has contributed to an ahistorical reification of the West and its constituent states. A series of false national genealogies characterized by modal slips and ahistorical assumptions has contributed to the construction of myths which articulate Western culture and society in essentialist terms. In fact, the cultural and historical enterprise of the “modern West” is a Medieval Mediterranean phenomenon. It emerged accidentally as a bundle of characteristics and attributes drawn from the multiplicity of models circulating around the pre-Modern Mediterranean, embodied by indigenous models as well as those of North African, Levantine, Persian and other more distant origins. Thus, rather than focusing on imagined attributes of the West and searching out their remote antecedents (as Said with “Orientalism”), we will investigate the process by which cultural, social and institutional models were apprehended, and adopted, modified or discarded, as the new, aggressively ecumenical, continental, Roman Catholic, exogamous, patrilineal, proto-capitalist, vernacular, monarchical, proto-national, mercantile society of the Mediterranean emerged leading into the sixteenth-century. We will take the “problem of Modernity” back to its Mediterranean roots, eschewing the teleological assumptions and diachronic emphasis which have characterized much of such inquiry in favor of an organic, syncretic approach to socio-cultural evolution. Because of its breadth and complexity this project is by nature collaborative and interdisciplinary: although primarily a historical and literary endeavor it draws on fields such as sociology, anthropology, economics, and religious studies, not only to defeat tendencies towards disciplinary parochialism but to apprehend and understand the broad range of factors at work.
Our full proposal can be found here.
Running from September 4 to December 14, 2007 our regular group included nine scholars who represent a diverse range of scholarship: five historians and four literary scholars, half of whom work on the Middle Ages and half on the Early Modern, and who together cover the Iberian peninsula, France, Italy the Maghreb and East Africa, as primary geographical locations with and many interesting overlapping connections. We were also joined on an occasional basis by other faculty from UC Irvine, as well as UC Davis, UC Santa Barbara, and the University of Southern California.
The program can be found here.
A follow-up conference, "Alternative Teleologies: The Mediterranean and the Modern World(s)," will be held on 17 January 2009 at the University of California Santa Cruz.
Convenor:
- Brian A. Catlos
Co-organizers:
- Brian A. Catlos
- Sharon Kinoshita
Participants:
- Celine Dauverd (UCLA)
- Ray Kea (UC Riverside)
- Seth Kimmel (UC Berkeley)
- Karla Mallette (Miami U. Ohio)
- Daniel Schroeter (UC Irvine)
- Núria Silleras-Fernandez (UC Santa Cruz)
- Oumelbanine Zhiri (UC San Diego)
For more on the participants, click here.
Back row from left to right:
Ray Kea, Brian Catlos, Seth Kimmel, Daniel Schroeter
Front row from left to right:
Céline Dauverd, Karla Mallette, Nuria Silleras-Fernández, Sharon Kinoshita, Oumelbanine Zhiri