The Center for Eastern Mediterranean Studies (CEMS) at Central European University and its junior members are proud to announce the forthcoming sixth International Graduate Conference on Cultural Entanglement, Transfer and Contention in Mediterranean Communities. The conference will provide a forum for graduate and advanced undergraduate students working on the Eastern Mediterranean to present their current research, exchange ideas, and develop scholarly networks.

Conference Description

Marking the boundary of three continents, the Mediterranean has been one of the world’s premier zones of cultural interaction since antiquity. From the Romans to the Ottomans, the first caliphs to Queen Victoria, the powers who sought dominance over this sea reckoned with this history of multiplicity by appropriating its rich past and attempting to imitate and outdo their predecessors and contemporaries. Diverse communities, moreover, concomitantly sought to survive and prosper in competition and cooperation with one another. The aim of this conference is to work against the grain of disciplinary boundaries to better understand these processes of inheritance, transmission, and exchange both diachronically and synchronically. How were the cultures of Mediterranean communities particularized through accommodation to, modification of, and divergence from their shared pasts? How did rulers manage these shifting webs of diversity? What procedures drew boundaries between cultures, either successive or contemporary, if and when such lines can be drawn? What evidence and methodologies can be brought to bear to read genuine curiosity, selective accommodation, and outright rejection in these exchanges within and across polities in the Mediterranean?

Young scholars from across the globe will be invited to share their work and come to grips with how to conduct research in an academic environment that increasingly demands both specialized expertise and comparative breadth. We seek innovative proposals by graduate students from all disciplines that relate to the Mediterranean world, including but not limited to Anthropology, Archeology, Art History, Classics, Environmental Science, Gender Studies, History, Languages and Literatures, Medieval Studies, Philosophy, Religion, and Theology.

Possible paper topics might include, but are not limited to:

The entanglements and diverse heritages of elite artistic, literary, and intellectual cultures
Rethinking big processes, e.g. Hellenization, Romanization, Christianization, and Islamization
Interaction and diversity in everyday life and popular/vernacular cultures
Trans-imperial/trans-national subjects, contact zones, gendered boundaries, and porous identities within and beyond borders
Maintaining common identities in diasporas: the connections and differences between communities across far-flung geographies
Communities and networks (intellectual, professional, mercantile, civic, military, domestic, etc.) that operate across ethnic and national lines
Conquest, colonization, environmental change, and shifting landscapes of diversity
Envisioning pluralism in philosophical, theological, and legal discourses of order
Intra-communal politics in contexts of social, economic, and gender stratification
Migration, urban economies, and the transformation of spatial and social structures
The (re)invention of national communities and their relationship to legacies of difference
The re-appropriation of imperial pasts in Mediterranean societies


Please submit by February 15, 2019 a short paper proposal (no more than 250 words, together with a brief biography and contact information) to the following address: cemsconference@ceu.edu. Results will be announced on March 4, 2019.



Keynote Speakers

Nicholas Purcell (University of Oxford)

Arietta Papaconstantinou (University of Reading)

Zeynep Türkyilmaz (Forum Transregionale Studien, Berlin)