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Retracing Mediterranean Locations

When:
Venue: Birkbeck Main Building, Malet Street

No booking required

How are climate change, economic crises, and nationalist movements changing our understanding of the Mediterranean?  Professor Sarah Green (Helsinki) in conversation with Dr Joseph Viscomi. 

The Mediterranean waxes and wanes as a region of scholarly investigation. In recent years it has resurfaced in public debates on popular uprisings that unsettled long-standing political regimes, economic crises that generated widespread precarity, nationalist movements that have reified some borders while condemning others, and climate change which continues to bring drastic changes to Mediterranean landscapes. The circulation and stagnation of people, animals, ideas, and objects provoked by these events draw attention to connections and separations that, in turn, challenge strict geopolitical boundaries (Europe, the Middle East and North Africa) and temporal periodisation (medieval, early modern, modern and contemporary). Sarah Green will discuss how her ongoing research projects, including her ERC advanced grant “Crosslocations: Rethinking relative location in the Mediterranean,” attempt to reconceptualise empirical and theoretical scholarship in/of the Mediterranean.

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Sarah Green is Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Helsinki. Her research focuses on questions of location, borders and the politics and epistemology of spatial relations and separations. Her regional expertise includes the Greek-Albanian border region, the Balkan region, the Aegean region, the European Union and the UK. Her books include Urban Amazons (Macmillan 1997), Notes from the Balkans (Princeton 2005) and Borderwork (with Lena Malm; JaSilti 2013).

Joseph John Viscomi is lecturer in modern European history at Birkbeck. His research focuses on questions of temporality/historical time, migration, geopolitics, and environment in the Mediterranean.

The Department of History, Classics and Archaeology at Birkbeck has a distinguished tradition as an international centre of excellence. We are the only university department in London to include archaeologists, classicists and historians investigating every period from prehistory to the early twenty-first century. Join us to discover the past and engage with the present across continents and cultures.

This event is part of Birkbeck's Discover the Past series. To see the full list of events, click here.

Photographs may be taken at this event for future use in printed and online publicity, and social media.

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