Call for Paper
DiplomatiCon Project (Power in History: Centre for Political History, and Centre for Urban History) invites papers on the spaces of formal and informal diplomacy in the Premodern Mediterranean as part of a two-day interdisciplinary workshop held at the University of Antwerp and hosted by the History Department on September 18-19, 2025.
Deadline for abstracts: May 15, 2025
Notification : End of May, 2025
Keynote spreaker : Zoltán Biedermann (University College London)
Fernand Braudel’s 1949 seminal study La Méditerrannée inspired a continuous expansion of the field of Mediterranean studies. Scholars have found the Sea to be dividing, corrupting, connected, claimed, contested, or shared. The guiding principle, however, appears to have been to reduce this space to a single unit of analysis. While the scale of that space may vary, its uniformity has seldom been questioned. It is often assumed that different polities and communities claimed a monopoly over that space. Yet, their perceptions or ideas about it may not only have differed but may also have been multi-layered and contingent on circumstances.
This workshop aims to reappraise the Mediterranean space, taking into consideration the various actors and institutions that have been in contact or have been involved with the sea during the medieval and early modern periods. The goal is to question and nuance the great narratives of the Sea, and to break this single space into appropriate units of analysis. Several aspects have been looked at in the definition or delimitation of this Mediterranean space—geography, ecology, politics, religion or economy—that are usually taken separately and independently of each other. This workshop aims to bring nuance to the issue by shifting the perspective from monolithic concepts to actor-oriented emergent patterns. Instead of imposing definitions from the outside, it seeks to identify various spaces and their limits from within. This can be achieved by identifying the actors involved, the mechanisms through which spaces emerge, and the purposes they serve.
We are interested in exploring how spaces were produced and experienced by the actors themselves, the institutions and structures that facilitated this production, how these spaces were perceived and communicated to a broader audience, and potential variation in the permanence of different types of spaces and their uses. We further aim to complement traditional research by applying quantitative methods, spatial analysis, and GIS.
We invite paper proposals in the various themes:
- Spatial Humanities and the Mediterranean
- Diplomatic History (Interconfessional diplomacy influenced by the New Diplomatic History)
- Geographies of contact and information circulation
- Premodern Cartography in the Meditteranean
- Islamic Mediterranean
- Jewish communities in the Mediterranean (Genizah material)
- Mapping contacts and mobility in the Mediterranean
- Other related themes…
Papers will then be developed and reworked for publication in a peer-review volume or a special issue.
You can submit your abstract (max. 500 words) to Malika Dekkiche and Iason Jongepier at DiplomatiCon@uantwerpen.be by May 15, 2025.