Cultural Hybridities:
Christians, Muslims & Jews in the Medieval Mediterranean
NEH Summer Institute for College and University
Professors
July 4ÐJuly 31, 2010 ¥ Barcelona (Spain)
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Faculty & Staff
Judith Cohen
Steven A. Epstein
Harvey Hames
Peregrine Horden
Michael Ursell, Program Coordinator
Brian A. Catlos (Co-Director) is Associate Professor of History at the University of California Santa Cruz, and Visiting Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Colorado at Boulder. His research focuses on social and economic relations between ethno-religious communities in medieval Christendom and the Islamic world, and in understanding the pre-Modern Mediterranean. He has published one monograph, The Victors and the Vanquished: Christians and Muslims of Aragon and Catalonia, ca. 1050-1300 (Cambridge UP, 2005), which won the AHA's Premio del Rey and Fagg Prize. An edited volume in honor of his doctoral supervisor, Andrew M. Watson, Worlds of Economy and History (UP Valencia) is at press. He has written numerous articles, most recently ÒThe de Reys (1220Ð1501): The Evolution of a ÒMiddle-ClassÓ Muslim Family in Christian AragonÓ Viator 40 (2009): 197Ð219, and ÒJustice Served or Justice Subverted? Two Muslim Women Sue a local MudŽjar Official in Thirteenth-Century AragonÓ Anuario de Estudios Medievales 39 (2009): 177Ð202. Currently he is an NEH Research Fellow, working on a book, Muslims of Latin Christendom, ca. 1050--1615, for Cambridge UP. He is President of the American Academy of Research Historians of Medieval Spain, and a Project Member at Spain's Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cient’ficas (Barcelona). In addition, Brian is a veteran travel writer, having written for the Rough Guides and other publishers on France and Spain, including two guide books for Barcelona. The city was his home for six years, and he has continued to live there part-time since 2002.
For the last few years he has been co-Director, with Sharon Kinoshita, of the Mediterranean Seminar, a Mediterranean Studies initiative based at UC Santa Cruz. Their program has included regular research-related activities at UCSC, as well as a number of projects and collaborations within the UC system and around the world, including a very successful NEH Summer Institute in 2008. In July, he will begin co-Directing a 5-year Multi-Campus Research Project on Mediterranean Studies, funded by the UC Office of the President, and is looking forward to the imminent establishment of a Center for Mediterranean Studies at UCSC.
"I'm very excited about this next NEH Summer Institute. Our last Institute was an excellent experience for our participants, faculty and the us, the organizers, as well as being a lot of fun. Challenging as it may be, I am looking forward to helping to make this an even better and more valuable experience for all involved. Embarking on new approaches to the study of our past and collaborative work are both essential to advancing Humanities and Social Science Research; we are fortunate that the NEH is giving us this opportunity to develop ourselve as scholars and help to push forward our various disciplines."
Sharon Kinoshita (Co-Director)
Nœria Silleras-Fern‡ndez (Co-Organizer)
More information coming soon...
Judith Cohen is an ethnomusicologist, medievalist and performer whose specialty is Sephardic music and its diasporas, including the Balkans, northern Morocco, French Canada and medieval Iberia. She teaches part-time at York University and is the editor of the Alan Lomax Spain recordings. She has issued several CDs of Sephardic, medieval and related music, mostly produced in Spain.
ÒThis proposed month offers exciting possibilities for going far beyond facile and oft-repeated stereotypes to work toward a deeper understanding of the complex relationships among Islam, Judaism and Christianity in the many and varied, but connected, geographical, cultural, historical and social spaces of the Mediterranean.Ó
Steven A. Epstein was educated at Swarthmore College, St JohnÕs College Cambridge, and Harvard University, where he received his Ph.D. degree in 1981. He taught for three years at Harvard, nineteen years at the University of Colorado, and is now in his seventh year at the University of Kansas. Encouraged by David Herlihy, he began his research in Genoa by exploring its marvelous archives for information about its economy and society, and nearly all his work since has centered on these central themes. Branching out from Genoa, he has followed his merchants and travelers into the eastern Mediterranean and beyond. He is the author of five books, including a history of Genoa, an account of slavery in Italy, and most recently, An Economic and Social History of Later Medieval Europe, 1000-1500 (Cambridge, 2009).
ÒI'm excited to participate in this institute because I still remember the first time I saw the Mediterranean and it changed my life. Every chance to talk about it is a fresh opportunity to learn something about the peoples living on its diverse shores and islands. My main interest is in the people who lived there centuries ago, especially those who were not "pure" enough for the arbiters of purity. This is the beginning of the story of the human hybrid.Ó
Harvey Hames received his PhD in Medieval History from Cambridge University in 1996. At present he is Associate Professor in the General History Department at Ben Gurion University of the Negev. His research interests include Medieval and Renaissance Jewish and Christian mysticism and philosophy, apocalypticism, inter-religious polemics and issues dealing with conversion. Among his publications, The Art of Conversion: Christianity and Kabbalah in the Thirteenth Century (Leiden 2000) and Like Angels on Jacob's Ladder: Abraham Abulafia, the Franciscans and Joachimism, (State University of New York Press 2007).
Peregrine Horden is Professor of Medieval History at Royal Holloway, University of London, and an extraordinary research fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. He is co-author, with Nicholas Purcell, of the two-volume Study of Mediterranean History, of which volume 1, The Corrupting Sea, was published in 2000, and vol. 2, Liquid Continents, is forthcoming. He has also written extensively on the history of medicine and charity in the Middle Ages. His most recent book is Hospitals and Healing from Antiquity to the Later Middle Ages, 2008.
Professor Horden has been a collaborator and supporter of the Mediterranean Seminar for many years. He was universally praised by participants of our 2008 NEH Summer Institute for his lectures and seminars, and most of all for mentorship and support. It is with great pleasure that we welcome Professor Horden back as a faculty member in this, our second Barcelona Summer Institute.
Cynthia Robinson is Associate Professor of Medieval and Islamic Art History at Cornell University. Her research interests are focused on the visual, literary and devotional products of cultural contact, dialogue and interchange in multi-confessional contexts, with particular focus on the Iberian peninsula, 1000-1500 A.D. Her publications include In Praise of Song: the Making of Courtly Culture in al-Andalus and Provence, 1065-1135 A.D. (Leiden, 2002), Three Ladies and A Lover: Mediterranean Courtly Culture through the Text and Images of the ÒHad”th Bay‰d wa Riy‰d,Ó an Andalus” Manuscript (London, 2006), and the forthcoming Imag(in)ing Passions: Christ, the Virgin, Images and Devotion in a Multi-Confessional Castile, 14th-15th c. (Pittsburgh, 2011). She is also the author of several edited collections, as well as numerous articles in journals such as Gesta, Medieval Encounters, Muqarnas, Reales Sitios, and Speculum. Her next project focuses on the religious life of the Nasrid kingdom of Granada.
ÒI am particularly excited about the NEH Summer Institute because I am eager to contribute toward a re-evaluation and re-centering of the way medieval topics are presented to students at all levels, including the introductory. A reconfiguring of medieval Europe in ways that place the Mediterranean, its shores and all contiguous areas at the center, rather than on the periphery, of the disciplines that make up Medieval Studies not only makes things more interesting, it also offers a more accurate picture of most aspects of medieval culture. A primary objective of my participation is that of assisting educators at all levels in pursuing projects and developing classroom models that locate cultural contact, conflict, and the interchanges that inevitably accompanied these processes at the center of a semester's or academic year's curriculum.Ó
The image is a detail of the ceramic insets that adorn the dome of the "Chapel of St. Jerome" (capilla de San Jero'nimo) at the convent of Poor Claires (the second, or female, branch of the Franciscan Order) at the convent of the Concepcio'n Francisca in Toledo, Spain, ca. 1430 A.D. Among the motifs that adorn the dome are amulets in pseudo-Kufic (pseudo-Arabic) script and "Hands of Fatima." These are traditionally considered "Islamic" motifs, but their presence in a Christian funerary context forces us to reconsider such facile associations and identifications, as well as their accompanying assumptions.
More information coming soon...
Michael Ursell (Program Co-Ordinator) is a PhD candidate in the department of Literature at the University of California Santa Cruz. His research focuses on lyricism in England and France ca. 1530-1660. He is currently writing a dissertation on figures of poetic inspiration in the works of Louise LabŽ, ClŽment Marot, John Donne and John Milton. He is also interested in the history of the book and the history of medicine.
Michael has worked as a Program Administrator with the Mediterranean Seminar since 2007, and helped plan and coordinate the 2008 NEH summer institute in Barcelona.
