From its inception at UC Santa Cruz in 2003, the “California School” of Mediterranean Studies has promoted the Mediterranean not (pace Braudel) as a predefined place of the olive and the vine, but as a heuristic rubric useful for disrupting or reconfiguring existing categories of analysis (especially those defined by nation-states, continents, or religious cultures)—in the process generating new questions and bringing new objects, case studies, or perspectives into focus. Now, two decades on, the Fall 2023 Mediterranean Seminar Workshop will return to UCSC on the 20th anniversary of the foundation of the UCSC Mediterranean Studies Reading Group, the precursor to the Mediterranean Seminar, to take stock of the field and suggest new avenues of research and methodologies.  

“Mediterranean Studies, Present & Future: The ‘California School’ Twenty Years On,” the Mediterranean Seminar Fall 2023 Workshop, is is organized by Sharon Kinoshita and Brian A. Catlos, and is hosted by the University of California, Santa Cruz, sponsored by the Literature Department and the Humanities Division with generous support from the Siegfried B. and Elisabeth Mignon Puknat Endowment for Literary Studies, The Humanities Institute, and the Center for the Middle East and North Africa at UCSC, together with the CU Mediterranean Studies Group and the Mediterranean Seminar.

For more information, please contact: mailbox@mediterraneanseminar.org.