The 2nd Wadjih F. al-Hamwi Prize for the Best First Book in Mediterranean Studies (2024)

The 2nd Wadjih F. al-Hamwi Prize for the Best First Book in Mediterranean Studies covers scholarly and trade publications published from 2021 to 2023 inclusive. The committee is most interested in books that break new ground conceptually or methodologically, are comparative and/or interdisciplinary, that emphasize intercultural/interregional/inter-religious contact, and that are “of” rather than merely “in” the Mediterranean. Books ranging from any period will be considered, and entries from any of the relevant Humanities and Social Sciences disciplines are welcome, including but not limited to all fields of history, art and material culture, literary and cultural studies, anthropology, and sociology. The Mediterranean is broadly construed as the region centered on the sea, but including connected hinterlands in Europe, Sub-Saharan Africa, the western Indian Ocean, the Near East and Central Asia.

The prize is named in honor of Wadjih Fouad al-Hamwi (1938-2021). Born and raised in Aleppo, the city he lived in throughout his life, Wadjih earned a degree in English Literature at Aleppo University where he then began to teach. Here, he earned the admiration and respect of both colleagues and the scores of students that passed through his classroom, such that he could scarcely walk down the street in Aleppo without being greeting by embraces, handshakes, and cries of Ustadh! from passersby. Eventually, he left the university to open a professional translation service, and came to be reputed as one of the top English-Arabic translators in Syria, before beginning work in tourism as well. Immensely proud of his Arab (through his father) and Ottoman (through his mother) heritages and of his Syrian homeland, he was a humane and cosmopolitan individual, whose friendships were not foreclosed by national, ethnic or religious identity, and whose noble character, generosity and humanity epitomized the best values of the Mediterranean Seminar in particular and of humanities scholarship in general. He remained in Aleppo with his family through the tribulations of the last decade, succumbing after a determined fight to COVID in March 2021. Brian Catlos, Mediterranean Seminar Co-Director had the great privilege of studying Arabic under Wadjih in Aleppo in 1992-3 establishing what became a deep friendship which endures now as a dear memory.

The committee for the 2024 Wadjih F. al-Hamwi Prize was:
• Brian A. Catlos: Religious Studies, University of Colorado Boulder
• Sharon Kinoshita: Literature, University of California Santa Cruz
• Konstantina Zanou: Italian, Columbia University

The Mediterranean Seminar is happy to announce the results of the 2024 First Book Prize contest. Out of a a robust field of entries, the committee looked for books that were rigorously researched, original and innovative, in terms of methodology, perspective, and which engaged with the Mediterranean as frame of inquiry. The committee decided unanimously to award this year’s prize to Andreas Guidi for his book, Generations of Empire: Youth from Ottoman to Italian Rule in the Mediterranean, and to give an honorable mention to two other entries: Anthi Andronikou’s Italy, Cyprus, and Artistic Exchange in the Medieval Mediterranean and Matt King’s Dynasties Intertwined. The Zirids of Ifriqiya & the Normans of Sicily. The Mediterranean Seminar congratulates all of the entrants on their excellent scholarship and on their first book. The quality and range of the books submitted speak volumes to the robustness of our field, and we look forward to your future contributions.

Winner

Andreas Guidi, Generations of Empire: Youth from Ottoman to Italian Rule in the Mediterranean (University of Toronto Press, 2022).
Generations of Empire is remarkable for a number of reasons. By focusing on the island of Rhodes in the Eastern Mediterranean during the first half of the twentieth century, when the multiethnic region of the Dodecanese passed from Ottoman to Italian rule, this book examines a society in transition between a premodern empire and a modern colonial one. By emphasizing continuities rather than ruptures, Guidi reframes Italian colonialism in the Mediterranean as a post-Ottoman phenomenon and brings together two historiographical fields which tend to work separately: Italian and Ottoman history. In showing how Italy built its empire by engaging with pre-existing empires, Guidi encourages a reading by which premodern, multi-ethnic empires were replaced, not by modern nation-states, but by modern colonial powers. He thus complicates the conventional dichotomy between empire and nation-state. What is more, his focus on the everyday life of local inhabitants sheds light on the ways people navigated between various ethnic and religious belongings, distinct levels of Italian citizenship and local and imperial power structures. By narrating the different trajectories of Greek Orthodox, Jewish, Catholic and Muslim families and individuals, Generations of Empire is also a book about mobility in the modern Mediterranean and the refashioning of belongings between communities and nations in a time of enormous geopolitical transformation.

Honorable Mention

[listed in alphabetical order]

Anthi Andronikou, Italy, Cyprus, and Artistic Exchange in the Medieval Mediterranean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022).
Islands often prove productive sites from which to reframe existing historiographies, and Cyprus is no exception. Reflecting its turbulent history in the high and late Middle Ages, its material culture has typically been subsumed under the larger categories of Byzantine, Crusader, or Italian art. In Italy, Cyprus, and Artistic Exchange in the Medieval Mediterranean, taking Cyprus as one node of a network stretching from northern and southern Italy to the Holy Land, Andronikou explores “the diaspora of peoples and their religious, artistic, and cultural agendas” criss-crossing the Mediterranean from c. 1200 to 1400. Questioning traditional provenances, speculating on the broad cultural contexts of now-lost objects, and using the peregrinations of the Crusading king Peter I of Cyprus as a through-line, Andronikou uses close readings of objects and motifs to complicate our understanding of lines of transmission and “influence,” with special emphasis on the connections between Cyprus and Southern Italy. An impressive work of research and analysis, Italy, Cyprus, and Artistic Exchange in the Medieval Mediterranean clearly merits honorable mention.

Matt King, Dynasties Intertwined. The Zirids of Ifiriqiya & the Normans of Sicily (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2022)
Matt King’s Dynasties Intertwined: The Zirids of Ifriqiya and the Normans of Sicily (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2022 engages with a wide range of sources in Latin and Arabic to demonstrate the entanglements between the Zirids of Ifriqiya and the Normans of Sicily from the late-eleventh through the late-twelfth centuries. In King’s analysis the two dynasties are revealed not as alien entities regarding each other across an unbreachable cultural/confessional chasm, but rather as two patrimonial ventures driven to engage with each other both in military conflict and – at times coerced – collaboration, as the Norman kings sought to construct a multi-confessional imperium that bridged the northern and southern shores of the middle sea. Although primarily a study of political and economic history, King also engages with questions relating to religious warfare and religious “tolerance.” This well-written study is a welcome addition to the historiography of the medieval Mediterranean by contributing to a regional history of the central Mediterranean that spans continents and religions, and reflects much promise for future scholarship.