The Medieval Mediterranean & the Emergence of the West

NEH Summer Institute for College and University Professors

June 30–July 25, 2008 • Barcelona (Spain)

Organizers & Faculty

Brian A. Catlos (History, University of California Santa Cruz)

Sharon Kinoshita (Literature, University of California Santa Cruz)

Jonathan Bloom (Islamic and Asian Art, Boston College)
Anthony Cutler (Art History, Penn State)
Ross Brann (Near East Studies, Cornell University)
Richard Bulliet (Middle East Institute, Columbia University)
Peregrine Horden (Medieval History, Royal Holloway, London)
Maria Rosa Menocal (Spanish and Portuguese, Yale)
David Nirenberg (Committee on Social Thought/ History, U. Chicago)
Julio Samsó (Philology, Universidad de Barcelona).

Organizers:

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Brian A. Catlos (on right) became an Associate Professor of History at UC Santa Cruz in 2002, after spending six years in Barcelona researching and writing his dissertation and as a post-doc with Boston University and the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas. Specializing in minority-majority relations and ethno-religious identity in medieval Christendom and the dar al-Islam, he has become interested in investigating the Pre-Modern Mediterranean as a historical region and a historiographical construct. He has written a number of scholarly articles, and his prize-winning book The Victors and the Vanquished: Christians and Muslims of Catalonia and Aragon, 1050-1300 (Cambridge: 2004) is soon to be released in Spanish by Valencia University Press. He is President of the American Academy of Research Historians of Medieval Spain and a project member at the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (Barcelona). In addition to his research, he also writes travel guidebooks and has become involved in documentary film. Further information can be found here. "I am looking forward to this NEH Summer Institute, which I think will offer a singular opportunity for interdisciplinary collaboration. We are fortunate to have a stellar teaching faculty, and Barcelona is an ideal setting for an undertaking such as this."

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Sharon Kinoshita is Professor of World Literature & Cultural Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. A specialist in the literature of the French middle ages, she is the author of numerous articles on twelfth- and thirteenth-century epic and romance and the co-author, with Jason Jacobs, of “Ports of Call: Boccaccio’s Alatiel in the Medieval Mediterranean” (Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 2007). Her book, Medieval Boundaries: Rethinking Difference in Old French Literature (Pennsylvania, 2006), offered rereadings of key texts such as the Chanson de Roland and the Lais of Marie de France as explorations of the problematics of contact across linguistic, cultural, or confessional lines. Her current book project, The Medieval Culture of Empire: Old French Literature and Beyond, examines literary representations of various aspects of the imperial court cultures common to the medieval Mediterranean and West-Central Asia. She spent Fall 2006 overlooking the Mediterranean at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France.

Faculty:

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Jonathan M. Bloom shares the Norma Jean Calderwood University Professorship of Islamic and Asian Art at Boston College with his wife and colleague, Sheila Blair, as well as the Hamad Bin Khalifa Endowed Chair of Islamic Art at Virginia Commonwealth University.  Bloom is the author or co-author of eleven books and hundreds of articles, both scholarly and popular, on virtually all aspects of Islamic art and architecture, although the principal focus of his research has been the Islamic arts of the Mediterranean basin in the medieval period.  His 2001 book, Paper Before Print:  the History and Impact of Paper in the Islamic Lands, won the Charles Rufus Morey Prize from the College Art Association.  His most recent book is Arts of the City Victorious: Islamic Art and Architecture in Fatimid North Africa and Egypt, published by the Institute of Ismaili Studies in association with Yale University Press.  Bloom and Blair have also edited the three-volume Grove Encyclopedia of Islamic Art and Architecture, to be published later this year by Oxford University Press. I am eager to participate in the NEH Summer Institute in Barcelona because it seeks to erase artificial boundaries in the study of the medieval Mediterranean basin.  As a historian of Islamic art, I have often seen how individuals in the medieval period carried works of art, technologies, and ideas from region to region with little regard to the confessional affiliations of the agent or patient.

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Ross Brann studied at the University of California, Berkeley, the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, New York University, and the American University in Cairo. He has taught at Cornell since 1986 and completed four terms of service as Chair of the Department of Near Eastern Studies. Brann is the Milton R. Konvitz Professor of Judeo-Islamic Studies and Alice Cook House Professor and Dean. Professor Brann is the author of The Compunctious Poet: Cultural Ambiguity and Hebrew Poetry in Muslim Spain (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991) and Power in the Portrayal: Representations of Muslims and Jews in Islamic Spain (Princeton University Press, 2002). He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies of the University of Pennsylvania. Brann is also the editor of three volumes and author of many essays on the intersection of medieval Jewish and Islamic culture. He is currently working on "Andalusi Moorings: Al-Andalus, Sefarad as Tropes of Muslim and Jewish Culture." In 1996, he received the Stephen and Margery Russell Award for Distinguished Teaching from the College of Arts and Sciences.

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Richard Bulliet is a professor of History and at the Middle East Institute at Columbia University. A frequent commentator on Islamic affairs for print and broadcast media, he has authored numerous studies of intellectual history, technological diffusion, and Muslim medieval and modern religious politics, including The Case for Islamo-Christian Civilization (2004), Islam: the View from the Edge, (1994), The Camel and the Wheel (1990), and his ground-breaking Conversion to Islam in the Medieval Period: An Essay in Quantitative History (1979).

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Anthony Cutler is Evan Pugh Professor of Art History at Penn State. Properly scrutinized, objects can be shown to be as much vehicles of ideas as are theologies, laws and works of literature.  Indeed, the “upper end” material creations of medieval societies offer no fewer (and by definition more substantial) insights into the preconceptions and purposes of cultures than the texts that historians normally study.  It was precisely this neglect of the tactile, and in some cases still visible, evidence that I found peculiarly frustrating when I suffered through years of undergraduate training as a medieval historian at Cambridge University.  Accordingly, as soon as I came to the U.S., and had the opportunity to direct my attention to things made by hand and intended to serve the needs – material, intellectual and spiritual – of human beings, that I moved into art history and took as the topic of my doctoral dissertation a comparative study of wall painting in Byzantium, Italy, and Serbia. Thereafter my interests expanded to encompass, first, manuscript illumination (The Aristocratic Psalters in Byzantium, Paris 1984) and then ivory carving (The Craft of Ivory. Sources, Techniques and Uses in the Mediterranean World, A.D. 200-1400, Washington, D.C. 1985; The Hand of the Master. Craftsmanship, Ivory, and Society (9th-11th Centuries, Princeton 1994).  Still dissatisfied, I enlarged my purview to include physical exchanges, in many different media, with the Islamic world.  In a succession of articles I have probed into the movement of things across the Eastern Mediterranean (Byzantium, Italy and the North. Papers on Cultural Relations, London 2000) and am currently at work on a book entitled The Empire of Things: Gifts and Gift Exchange between Byzantium, the Islamic World, and Beyond.

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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.

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Maria Rosa Menocal studied Romance Philology at the University of Pennsylvania, where she then taught until she moved to Yale in 1986, where she is now Sterling Professor of the Humanities, as well as Director of the Whitney Humanities Center. She likes to imagine that all her work since graduate student days, and especially from the publication twenty years ago of her first book, The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History: A Forgotten Heritage, has been devoted to the dismantling the many false dichotomies that plague the study of medieval literatures and cultures –and she is attracted to this NEH Summer Institute precisely because it is explicitly a part of the same kind of project. Her other academic books include Writing in Dante’s Cult of Truth: From Borges to Boccacio, and Shards of Love: Exile and the Origins of the Lyric, as well as  The Literature of Al-Andalus volume in the Cambridge History of Arabic Literature series, which she co-edited with Raymond Schiendlin and Michael Sells. In 2002 she published a more popular book, The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Christians and Jews Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain, and with Jerrilyn Dodds and Abigail Krasner Balbale she has recently finished a book for Yale University Press, due to appear in the fall of  2008. The co-authors are hoping the title will be something like The Invention of Castilian Culture: Intimacy and Betrayal, but no matter the final title it will be about the thorough intertwining of early Castilian culture with its rival Arabic traditions.

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David Nirenberg is a professor of History and on the Committee for Social Thought at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (Princeton, 1996), an influential rethinking of the relationship between violence and identity; his current research includes a study of the collapse of religious social and institutional contacts between countries of the northern and southern Mediterranean.

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Julio Samsó completed his degree at the Department of Semitic Philology of the University of Barcelona under the renown José María Millàs Vallicrosa and Juan Vernet, both authorities on Islamic science in Spain. Following this he studied in Syria, and had the opportunity of studying under Edward S. Kennedy. Having set out to study Islamic Astronomy, he realized that the Islamic West had been neglected by historians up to the point on the assumption that it had nor reached the same level of sophistication as the East, and from that point he has focused on al-Andalus and the Maghrib. After having taught at the University of La Laguna and the Autonomous University of Barcelona, he took up the chair of Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Barcelona in 1982. There he assembled a team of researchers who have garnered such distinctions as the Koyré Medal (Académie Internationale d'Histoire des Sciences, 1995). His interests have centered mainly on Medieval Astronomy in both Islamic and Christian Spain, the latter from the introduction of Islamic astronomy in Catalonia towards the end of the 10th century to the era of Alfonso X. With the publication of his monograph, Las Ciencias de los Antiguos en al-Andalus, and having served as curator for the major exhibition "El legado científico andalusí" at the Museo Arqueológico Nacional in Madrid, he became aware that practically all of the Andalusian astronomical treatises had been read, and at that point he turned his attention to sources from the Maghrib, which have occupied most of his attention over the last 15 years.

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