Cultural Hybridities: Christians, Muslims and Jews and the Medieval Mediterranean

FAIN: EH-50203-09

Regents of the University of California, Santa Cruz (Santa Cruz, CA 95064-1077)
Brian A. Catlos (Project Director: March 2009 to January 2012)

A four-week college and university faculty institute in Barcelona for twenty-five participants to examine the role that Mediterranean-based interactions of Christians, Jews, and Muslims played in the emergence of the pre-modern West.

The University of California, Santa Cruz proposes a 4-week inter-disciplinary Summer Institute for 24 college and university faculty to examine the medieval Mediterranean (c. 1100--1500) and its role in the emergence of the modern West. This is a sequel to our 2008 NEH Institute. Building on the infrastructure and collaborative relationships we established, we have revised our program in view of feedback from our 2008 participants. The Institute will focus on the Mediterranean as a zone where Christians, Muslims, and Jews came into contact, in peace as well as in war. This interaction made the Mediterranean region a forum for intellectual and cultural innovation and exchange, the dissemination of which was key in the emergence of the modern West. Our goal is once again to bring together a diverse group of scholars whose research and teaching would, as in 2008, benefit from and contribute to a reformulated understanding of the Mediterrean's role in the development of modernity.