Mediterranean History Research Cluster

In recent years, the Mediterranean has once again come to prominence in world politics: popular uprisings have unsettled long-standing political regimes; wars and economic crises have generated widespread precarity and large movements of migrants and refugees; and climate change continues to reshape the Mediterranean landscape. The circulation of people, ideas, and goods provoked by these events draws attention to historical connections and divisions that challenge strict geopolitical boundaries (Europe, the Middle East, and Northern Africa). Within the increasingly important field of Mediterranean history, the boundaries of the Mediterranean worlds have been radically questioned and problematised, leading to new perspectives on occidentalist and Eurocentric narratives. Numerous books and essays published in the last two decades have shed new light on the Mediterranean space. They have suggested original ways of viewing it as a specific category of historical analysis, by exploring the complex entanglement of interactions and shared experiences taking place in the Mediterranean from the ancient to the modern period.

The Cambridge Mediterranean History Research Cluster was inaugurated in 2021, as a means of generating collaboration and debate on themes within Mediterranean History, building bridges between political, intellectual, social, cultural, and economic approaches. The Cluster programme is designed to cut across periods, geographies, and methodologies and to generate new collaborative research.

The majority of our members are based in the Faculty of History, but the work of the group aims to engage researchers in other Centres, Faculties and Departments across Cambridge, and those beyond our local context. Ongoing research within our community focuses on the history of migrations and diasporas, revolutions, religious encounters, empire, seafaring, food, networks of connectivity, urban history, the history of political ideas, and material exchanges, among other topics.

We are also keen to ensure that conversations engage both early-career and senior scholars, and that we foreground the work of those relatively early in their academic careers. 

To contact the current cluster convenor, Dr Sara Caputo, please email mediterranean-research@hist.cam.ac.uk or sc914@cam.ac.uk.