Mediterranean History Research Cluster

In recent years, the Mediterranean has come once again to prominence in world politics: popular uprisings have unsettled long-standing political regimes; economic crises have generated widespread precarity; nationalist movements have reified borders, and climate changes continue 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 problematized, leading to new perspectives on the occidentalist and Eurocentric narratives. The plethora of books and essays published in the last two decades have shed new light on the Mediterranean space and 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.

Scholars at the Faculty of History at the University of Cambridge played a fundamental role in promoting cutting-edge research on Mediterranean History from the antiquity to the modern period. The Mediterranean History Research Cluster was inaugurated in 2021 as a means for generating collaboration and debate on themes of Mediterranean History, which serves to build bridges between political, intellectual, social, cultural and economic approaches to history.  Mediterranean History Cluster is designed to cut across periods, geographies and methodologies and to generate new collaborative research.

Our core members are within the History Faculty, but the work of the group aims to engage researchers in other Centres, Faculties and Departments in Cambridge, and those beyond our local context. By focusing on the history of migrations and diasporas, revolutions, religious encounters, food, urban history and material exchanges, the Mediterranean History Research Cluster challenges canonical chronologies, reshape regional boundaries, and rethink relationships within political and cultural communities.

We are also keen to ensure that conversations flow across early career and senior members of our academy, and that we foreground the work of those relatively early in their scholarly careers. 

To contact the cluster convenor Dr Fernanda Gallo, please email mediterranean-research@hist.cam.ac.uk or fg371@cam.ac.uk