Birkbeck welcomes new colleagues Dr Kate Franklin and Dr Joseph Viscomi
We are delighted to welcome two new permanent lecturers who will join our department in the coming academic year: Dr Kate Franklin and Dr Joseph Viscomi. Kate is a medievalist and archaeologist, Joseph a modern European historian. Although they work on very different periods and places, they both expand our department’s strength in the histories of mobility and migration. They also embody our commitment to teaching and researching topics outside narrow geographical, chronological and disciplinary boundaries. Here they introduce their research - and the exciting new postgraduate modules which they will teach in 2018-19.
Kate Franklin writes:
'I am an archaeologist of medieval Armenia and the Caucasus and a devoted enthusiast of sci-fi and sandwiches. I have been working on collaborative projects in Armenia for a decade, exploring the ways that local politics and Silk Road culture were tangled together in landscape and space-time. I am curious about the experiences of medieval travel, intimacies of medieval embodiment, and the profound and mundane practices of medieval and early modern hospitality. For the last three years I have worked on a cultural heritage management project focused on the archaeology of Afghanistan, directing both GIS data-collection strategy and original research into the pasts of Afghanistan and Central Asia. For two years I lectured in Anthropology at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, looking at imagined worlds in recipes, table-settings, archaeological assemblages and speculative fictions. My work at the moment is concerned with world-making as a locus of politics, with material culture as a mediator of spatio-temporal distances, and with the interpenetration of literary and ‘real’ landscapes in archaeological work.
At Birkbeck this coming year I will be exploring these themes in an MA module on the medieval Silk Road: ‘Imagining Global Cultures in the Middle Ages’. The course combines material and historical datasets to think about how medieval people imagined a world connected by the movement of humans, things and ideas--and reflects on the role the Silk Road plays in our contemporary imaginations.'
Joseph Viscomi writes:
'My primary research interests are in migration, geopolitics, and historical consciousness in Southern Italy and the Mediterranean. I completed my Ph.D. in Anthropology and History at the University of Michigan in 2016, and then became a Faculty Fellow at NYU’s Center for European and Mediterranean Studies. I am currently completing my first book, tentatively entitled The Migrant Mediterranean: Imperial Afterlives between Egypt and Italy, which explores how Italian residents in Egypt and the political actors around them anticipated, experienced and remembered their departures from Egypt between 1933 and 1967 in relation to contemporary historical events. The book draws together micro and geopolitical histories in studying the collapse of Italian fascism and decolonization in the Mediterranean. I am also developing a project that examines transformations in relations among people, territory and landscape during the depopulation of towns in Calabria (Italy) since the 1930s.
In the coming year at Birkbeck, I will offer an MA module on ‘European Crises in the Mediterranean, 1880s to present’. The goals of this module are twofold: first, to understand how the geohistorical Mediterranean has been approached by scholars; second, to develop from these approaches a methodology to study the modern Mediterranean.'
Apart from the new MA modules outlined above, Kate and Joseph will be teaching classes on our BA History, MA Medieval History and MA European History among other degrees. Their profiles will soon be available online alongside our more than forty other academic staff.