HS8: Mediterranean Seminar

About

We propose to host workshop focused on “Emotions, Passions, and Feelings” in the Mediterranean world. In doing so, we will bring together two of the most dynamic and exciting areas of premodern study in an event that provides a forum for both junior and seasoned scholars working within these fields to explore how they can be mutually beneficial. For scholars of emotions, the Mediterranean offers an opportunity to consider how emotions were means to establish, to ascertain, and to communicate identity.

For Mediterraneanists, emotions are an underexplored aspect of the various kinds of intercultural contact that defines their field. The questions that might emerge are endless: How did people, cultures, and institutions in the Mediterranean perceive emotions? Can we speak of a “standard of emotions” in a larger Mediterranean sense or were they relative to a particular space? Were emotions performed or ritualized? Were such performances translatable in inter-religious and inter-cultural settings? Mediterranean studies presents an ideal geography and framework for considering the larger issues discussed in the history of emotions: their universality, relativity, purpose, their place in power structures, their differences depending on race, ethnicity, gender, and their significance and understanding (or lack thereof of) in interfaith and inter-cultural relations.