Newsletter December 2021

By |2022-08-04T16:08:48+00:00December 23rd, 2021|PIMo Newsletters|

A Challenging but Productive Year Despite all the obstacles that 2020 has put in our way, our network has managed to adapt and continue to facilitate the production and exchange of top-class research on mobility in the Mediterranean. We successfully moved our major events online and developed new innovative strategies to facilitate the sharing of knowledge with network members and beyond. We launched a new podcast series, Contagion, exploring the history of pandemics  and public health in the Mediterranean space. The series, co-produced with the Cyber Review of Modern Historiography (Cromohs) and edited by network member Dr David Do Paço, is available to listen to here: https://oajournals.fupress.net/index.php/cromohs/contagion Our Visual Reflection series, edited by Dr Paola von Wyss-Giacosa, offered fascinating insights into the history of mobility in the Mediterranean space through the analysis of visual and material culture. You can catch up with the wide range of contributions to it here: https://www.peopleinmotion-costaction.org/news-views/. This year has also seen the publication of a number of books and journal articles connected to research conduct as part of the PIMo project. You can find full details here: https://www.peopleinmotion-costaction.org/publications/  If you would like to [...]

Ida Caiazza, Love, Gender, and Migration across the Sea: The Myth of Hero and Leander (Turner, Rubens, Lioret, Ovid)

By |2023-08-17T09:00:31+00:00December 17th, 2021|Visual Reflections|

Wild dashed the Hellespont its straited surge, And on the raised spray appeared Leander’s fall. These were the last two lines of the seven that, at the exhibition of the Royal Academy of London, 1837, accompanied Turner’s The Parting of Hero and Leander. (Figure.1) The first five lines described the imminent morning and the fading night, Love and Hymen, the “terraced steep”, all the “tokens of departure” depicted in the borders of the painting. The conclusive verses focused on its central elements: the rough sea, the coming storm, the premonition of death. The myth of Hero and Leander is the Greek archetype of a story of forbidden love and death, many times retold, in which one of the protagonists, one could argue from Turner’s verbal/visual interpretation, is the sea. The sea, in fact, stands out in Turner’s painting, being the focal point of the viewer’s perspective; in the written comment, it appears with its specific name (in Greek) and its metaphoric value as Leander’s lethal obstacle is explicitly revealed. Figure 1: Joseph Mallord William Turner, The Parting of Leander and [...]

Call for Papers, Objects in the Text and the Text on the Objects, WG1 Workshop, Lisbon, February 24-25th, 2021.

By |2021-12-03T10:30:13+00:00December 3rd, 2021|Calls for papers|

As part of our tangible cultural heritage, historic objects play an essential role in the construction of our social memory. Objects have different meanings and uses for different individuals and communities, and many objects have embedded texts or are accompanied by texts. All have different functions. These texts are intimately connected to the objects and, usually, but not always, help us to understand their role in the community, society or within the context in which they are used, reused or displayed, as in the case of objects kept in museums, archives and collections. The range of texts appearing on objects is very broad. They may contain information about the production or the producer of the object, references or a tribute to its owner, an explanation of the function they have or are meant to have (as in the case of amulets with apotropaic formulas, flags, items of clothing or co ins, for example). They may contain narratives of different kinds, or they may also have a more distinct decorative function such as the Arabic calligraphic script adorning all sort of [...]