Encounters in the Medieval Mediterranean World
Hussein Fancy (Yale University) & Jonathan Conant (Brown University)
This event will take place online; you will receive the necessary Zoom information under the “Additional Information” section in the confirmation email from Eventbrite upon registration. You will receive the Zoom link again in additional emails leading up to the lecture.
Lecture #1: Hussein Fancy (Yale University)
Title: “The Sea of Lies”
Abstract: “The past century of scholarship has offered two competing views of the medieval Mediterranean: a zone of intense conflict or one of intense contact. Grounded in Latin, Romance, and Arabic sources, this lecture traces the activities of impostors, people who crowded the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Mediterranean and force us to think beyond metaphors of contact and encounter to explain the relationships between Jews, Christians, and Muslims.”
Bio: Hussein Fancy is Associate Professor of History at Yale University. His research focuses on the social and intellectual history of interactions between Jews, Christians, and Muslims in the medieval Mediterranean as well as the intersection of Latin and Arabic archives. He is the author of The Mercenary Mediterranean (Chicago, 2016) and with Alejandro García Sanjuán, What was the Islamic Conquest of Iberia? Understanding the New Debate (Routledge, 2021).
Lecture #2: Jonathan Conant (Brown University)
Title: “Beyond the Mediterranean: Rethinking Africa in Late Antiquity”
Abstract: Studies of North Africa between the fourth and the seventh century CE typically understand Egypt and the Maghrib within a Mediterranean frame. This talk asks how our understanding shifts if we consider the region from the perspective of continental Africa, including ties across the Sahara, up the Nile, and along the Red Sea and Indian Ocean coasts. One answer is that the same processes of empire that facilitated the circulation of people, goods, and ideas within the later Roman world also extended well beyond the Mediterranean, linking the economies, societies, and cultures of southern Europe, western Asia, and Africa into an increasingly coherent system.
Bio: Jonathan Conant is Associate Professor of History at Brown University. His research focuses on the social history of North Africa and the western Mediterranean in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages. He is the author of Staying Roman: Conquest and Identity in Africa and the Mediterranean, 439–700 (Cambridge, 2012) and co-editor (with Susan T. Stevens) of North Africa under Byzantium and Early Islam (Dumbarton Oaks, 2016).
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