About the Mediterranean Seminar
Co-founded and co-directed by Brian A. Catlos (Religious Studies, CU Boulder) and Sharon Kinoshita (Literature, University of California, Santa Cruz), the Mediterranean Seminar is a collaborative interdisciplinary forum dedicated to promoting the insights that emerge when “the Mediterranean” is taken as the frame of analysis. Ours is a loosely bounded and multivalent Mediterranean, defined not by strict geographical borders but by connections, exchanges, and interactions. It includes the sea, its islands, its West Asian, African and European continental hinterlands, and the routes connecting it to lands beyond; it may extend to adjacent waterways such as the Black Sea, the Red Sea, the Atlantic seaboard, and even the Indian Ocean. In that our focus is centered on the Mediterranean region but not limited to it, scholars working on comparable issues in other regions and other aspects of “Oceanic Studies” are most welcome.
Thus construed, our Mediterranean seeks to present alternatives to established categories of historical and cultural analysis—the national, “civilizational,” confessional, and continental paradigms that too often presume distance between and homogeneity within the units they describe. Through an emphasis on exchange and interaction—including conflict—among and within diverse ethnic, religious, linguistic, and cultural communities, we interrogate the teleological narratives that have exercised an effective monopoly on the conception of modernity and its emergence, and on the nature of cultural identity in general. To this end, while we welcome projects ranging from prehistory to the present, we find the centuries between Late Antiquity through Early Modernity to be particularly formative for unsettling sedimented narratives of modernity. The Mediterranean framework, by highlighting questions of ethno-religious and ethno-cultural identity within and across Abrahamic confessional cultures, cross-cultural exchange (economic, scientific, philosophical, artistic, and literary), movement and migration, the construction of hegemonic power and of empire, and more, provides a forum for alternate genealogies that decenter the modern West.
The Mediterranean Seminar had its origins in 2003 when Catlos and Kinoshita established an informal reading group at the University of California, Santa Cruz. In 2007, we directed a 14-week residential research group at the University of California’s Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI) in Irvine, leading to the establishment of the Mediterranean Seminar. In 2008 they directed the first of four four-week National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Summer Institutes for College and University Professors in Barcelona. Between 2010 and 2015, as a Multi-Campus Research Project funded by the University of California Office of the President (Phase II), we organized three workshops per year, rotating through the campuses of the University of California and collaborating universities, as well as a range of ancillary programs in North America, Europe and North Africa, promoting and developing “the California school” of Mediterranean Studies. In 2015 we became a community-funded initiative (Phase III), continuing our thrice-annual workshops, now held across North America and the Mediterranean, and launching other ventures including a mailing list, podcast, online book review, article of the month feature, annual book prizes, a book series (Palgrave MacMillan) and our Summer Skills Seminars. From 2011 to 2024, through our satellite, the CU Mediterranean Studies Group, we organized a robust series of events at the University of Colorado Boulder and supported the publication of a ground-breaking undergraduate textbook and document reader. By 2020 we counted nearly 2,000 scholarly affiliates in over 40 countries.[1]
In 2025 we organized our first workshop with the support and collaboration of the American University Institute and the American College of the Mediterranean in Aix-en-Provence. In 2026 we inaugurated a formal partnership with the American College of the Mediterranean (Phase IV) with our Fall 2026 workshop held at the ACM campus in Barcelona. Through this partnership we look forward to regularly organizing workshops and other programs in conjunction with the ACM, and supporting its pedagogical and research mission, as well as continuing to expand our roster of programming and our network of collaborations in North America, Europe, around the Mediterranean, and across the globe.
In this endeavor, the Mediterranean Seminar engages broadly with the humanities, arts and social sciences. Our principles are interdisciplinary and non-hierarchical, emphasizing open dialogue reflecting a diversity of approaches, including emerging disciplines such as ecological studies and post-humanisms. Scholars and students, together with artists and authors, from any relevant field are welcome to enroll as affiliates of the Mediterranean Seminar. Membership is free. Scholars, universities, and institutions interested in collaborating, sponsoring a workshop, or supporting our mission are welcome to contact us.
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[1] For a more detailed account, see Sharon Kinoshita, “Mediterranean Studies.” Roundtable: Medieval Studies and its Institutions, ed. Roland Betancourt and Karla Mallette, Speculum 100.1 (2025): 188-90.