Mediterranean Crossings: A Studia Mediterranea Conference

Location: The Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences Split, Croatia

Dates: September 19-20, 2025

Abstract submission date: June 25, 2025

Keynote speaker (virtual): Anna Kornbluh (University of Illinois at Chicago)

*note: this is a hybrid conference, but there will be no recording and the conference is only open to registered participants

Despite Fernand Braudel’s much-quoted statement that, for the historian, the character of the Mediterranean “is complex, awkward, and unique. It cannot be contained within our measurements and classifications,” the sea has often been read in terms of interconnection and similarity. John Watkins, in an issue of Mediterranean Studies from 2014, discusses a shift in the field from acting as a “mediator” between scholarly work from the Cold War and that of Global studies in the 1990s, to a focus on globalization, with newer studies having an “emphasis on the region as a whole rather than on the histories of individual states within the region.” A more recent example of the trend of connection can be found in the introduction to Angela Biancofiore and Clément Barniaudy’s 2022 collection Re-storying Mediterranean Worlds, which asks the reader to frame the following essays by thinking “of Mediterranean worlds as interconnected worlds.” In a wider context, this thinking belongs to what Anna Kornbluh has identified as the "too-late capitalist" style of "immediacy," in which being absorbed in a text through immersion in an intense personal experience invites too-easy forms of identification which work against critical forms of thinking, or what she terms mediation (in contrast to Watkins, quoted above), which can be more focused on difference rather than similarity.

This conference, while still taking globalization seriously, aims to focus on the differences that are essential to the Mediterranean Sea. This reflects the “complex of seas” that are “piled one above the other” in Braudel’s quote, which stresses a gathering of otherness, not only on a representation of immediate connectedness. In this sense, the conference aims to be closer to what the late Inoslav Bešker wrote on the subject in his Mediterranean in Literature, in which the real differences of the various people belonging to the Mediterranean region and its isolated parts are only seen as coherent when represented within the imagination of others. The conference aims to develop various textual strategies, taken in the largest sense, for representing separation and connection together, which is an important strategy for the critical mediation needed for representing the Mediterranean as a complex system rather than a flattening whole. 

In short, as Braudel has said, “The Mediterranean is not even a single sea, it is a complex of seas; and these seas are broken up by islands, interrupted by peninsulas, ringed by intricate coastlines.” It is just this broken, complex, interrupted landscape that the conference Mediterranean Crossings aims to address. 

The conference welcomes contributions from a theoretical perspective, as well as those that address issues in literature, media, the arts, and other cultural studies.

The conference especially welcomes students and young scholars, and there will be a special section of the conference for such participants open to all research topics.

(CFP adapted from Brian Willems, "Editorial Introduction: Mediterranean Literary Studies," Anafora 11, No.2 (2024)).

Please submit abstracts of a maximum 300 words to bwillems@ffst.hr by May 25, 2025, with a short biographical note

Conference fees: 75 Euros for in-person attendance (fully employed)

                            50 Euros for students and the not fully employed in-person

                            40 Euros for virtual participation

This conference is organized by the Studia Mediterranea center of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences of the University of Split, Croatia.