Iain Chambers, Learning from the sea: migration and maritime archives.

By |2021-05-13T22:03:41+00:00February 24th, 2021|PIMo Conversations|

The sea is an anarchic passage; it evades any borders, it cancels out any trace of appropriation, it contests the arché of order and subverts the nómos on land. For this reason, the sea also preserves the memory of another clandestinity, that of oppositions, resistances, struggles. Not the clandestinity of a stigma, but rather that of a decision (Di Cesare 2020, 125).   Perhaps this affirmation by the Italian philosopher Donatella Di Cesare is too neat. We know that even the waters of the oceans, seas and their depths are being appropriated and increasingly resourced. Nevertheless, it serves to mark a certain limit in our reasoning and political calculus. At sea something always exceeds and flees the semantics secured on land, in the territories, buildings, monuments and laws. Thinking of the Mediterranean, Fernand Braudel (1995) famously proposed considerations of the deep rhythms of time, more recently Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell (2000) have encouraged us to confront the corruptive complications of multiple ecologies. The Mediterranean does not settle easily in predestined critical or cultural location. In immediate terms, contemporary European [...]

An Interview with Giancarlo Casale, Rosita D’Amora

By |2021-02-24T09:03:26+00:00February 15th, 2021|PIMo Conversations|

An Interview with Giancarlo Casale, Rosita D’Amora Salento University, Lecce   Giancarlo Casale is Chair of Early Modern Mediterranean History at the European University Institute in Florence, as well as a permanent member of the history faculty at the University of Minnesota. His new book, Prisoner of the Infidels: The Memoir of an Ottoman Muslim in Seventeenth-Century Europe will be released in summer 2021 from the University of California Press. Casale is also the author of award-winning Ottoman Age of Exploration (Oxford, 2011), and since 2010 has served as executive editor of the Journal of Early Modern History.   When we both started studying Ottoman history, this was not the most obvious choice of subject, especially for someone without a personal connection to the region. How did you get interested in Ottoman history and what have been the encounters, influences, personal choices and also fortuitous events that have shaped your intellectual and personal itinerary? Being an Ottoman historian, was it your ‘kismet’? Complete kismet. Retrospective kismet, if there is such a thing. The truth is that I had no background [...]

Pandemics and Population Mobility in Early Modern Europe: Actors, Networks, and Ideas, Tallinn University, 16 March 2021, Call for Papers

By |2021-02-11T10:01:07+00:00February 11th, 2021|Calls for papers|

WG2 Ideas in Motion Workshop on Pandemics and Population Mobility in Early Modern Europe: Actors, Networks, and Ideas, Tallinn University, 16 March 2021. This online  workshop seeks to revisit the effect of pandemics on population mobility and the emergence of new types of knowledge in pre-modern Europe and across the Mediterranean and the Baltic Sea regions in order to explore similarities and differences in connection with the recent outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic. We encourage contributions on specific case studies focusing on the links between epidemiological outbreaks, population mobility, and knowledge making, particularly in the early modern European period: We invite submissions on topics including, but not limited to: • The relation between the capacity of various organizations to control and monitor territories and population mobility; • artistic and intellectual articulations of experiences with pandemics and population related mobility (or immobility); • legal, political, theological, philosophical, and emotional arguments used to justify or prevent pandemic-related population mobility; • the role of established networks in enhancing or hindering population mobility, the emergence of new networks related to these functions; • the role [...]