UCLA Center for Medieval & Renaissance Studies | Mediterranean Studies Seminar

A seminar series funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Grant for “Transforming the Humanities at UCLA.”

Because of its Greco-Roman heritage, the Mediterranean has been considered the cradle of “Western” civilization and also the site of an original fault line between a homogenous “West” and an exotic, undervalued “East”—an “other” against which to defend and define the West. This dichotomy seems to be due not only to the emergence and the definition of the West, but also in large part is the product of nationalized, nineteenth-century disciplinarity.

Orbis terrae, ‘circle of of the world’ showing Asia, Europe, and Africa separated by the Don and Nile rivers, and the Mediterranean Sea. An illustration for Ovid's Metamorphoses, in Rawl. B 214, fol. 197r, a mid-fifteenth century English manuscript in the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. Image copyright Bodleian Library.

The field of Mediterranean Studies seeks to undo the long-held ideas of the “homogeneity of the West” and the “exoticism of the East.” The Mediterranean Sea does not keep continental landmasses apart, rather, it is a body of water that allows for fluidity and openness, connecting different worlds in a network that has shaped local social, commercial, political, and cultural developments. Whether these encounters and contacts happened in the mode of conflict (military and/or confessional) or exchange (commercial, artistic, or scientific), it is doubtless that they helped diffuse and transmit ideas, commodities, technologies, and even systems of thought. The cross-cultural, cross-linguistic, and cross-confessional exchange that has occurred over an extremely long period of time makes the Mediterranean a region of global importance.