Welcome to the Fall semester! The Mediterranean Topographies (“Meditopos”) team is thrilled to announce that we are back for another year of scholarly conversation, interactive workshops, and community building. We, student coordinators Leela Riesz and Spencer Cook, and faculty sponsor Will Stroebel, warmly invite you to take part in everything Meditopos has planned for the coming months.
As many of you know, the Meditopos Rackham Interdisciplinary Workshop first began in 2010 and was relaunched in 2023 after a long hiatus. We are eager to build on the last few years of momentum. This year’s program includes some exciting new activities—including conversations with artists and activists from Spain and Cyprus, graduate student writing workshops, and opportunities for pedagogical training and curriculum development regarding the Mediterranean. Meditopos is open to all members of the Michigan community who share an interest in any of these topics, no matter their disciplinary background or temporal/geographic focus.
Our first meeting will take place at 10 AM on Friday, September 18th in the Comparative Literature Library (Tisch Hall 2021c). We will kick off the semester with some icebreakers, a discussion of two short texts, and a brainstorming session to address questions of scheduling and generate ideas for future programming.
We will discuss the following readings (PDFs below):
Manuel Borutta & Sakis Gekas, “A Colonial Sea: the Mediterranean, 1798-1956” (2012)
Andrew Shryock, “Rites of Return: Back to the Mediterranean, Again” (2020)
Finally, we would like to highlight that two future sessions across the academic year will be writing workshops for graduate students. If you are a graduate student interested in sharing a Mediterranean-related dissertation chapter, conference paper, grant proposal, or other piece of work, please get in touch with us!
Best wishes, and looking forward to seeing you soon,
Spencer, Leela, and Will
