A busy year ahead for PIMo

As the restrictions connected to the pandemic are gradually being lifted, the PIMo network is once again able to organise multiple in-person and hybrid knowledge exchange, dissemination and training events. We will also continue to provide an online platform to share research and news from the PIMo community.

In this newsletter, we would like to bring your attention to a number of exciting upcoming events, including, but not limited to, our annual Management Committee Meeting in Athens on March 17th, which all MC members are invited to attend, and three training schools, which we would encourage you to promote to postgraduate and Early Career Researchers.

We also would like to welcome our new Project Officer, Davide Trentacoste, to the team. Davide may contact some members in the coming days and weeks with requests to update their information so please keep an eye out for those messages.

As ever, we welcome and encourage members to contribute to the work of PIMo, especially by providing Visual Reflections for our website. Please do get in touch with the Core Group with any suggestions or ideas.

All the best and hopefully see you soon,
PIMo Core Group

Athens Management Committee Meeting and WG2 Workshop, March 17th

The PIMo Core Group are delighted to inform members that our Annual Management Committee Meeting will take place in Athens on March 17th. All PIMo Management Committee members are eligible and encouraged to attend. Costs will be covered, in line with the rules outlined in the Vademecum, for Management Committee members.

The meeting will be combined with a workshop, organised by WG2 and hosted by the Institute of Historical Research of the National Hellenic Research Foundation, on ‘Thinking the Mediterranean: Communities and Identities’.

Full details of the Programme can be found here: https://www.peopleinmotion-costaction.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/ATHENS-FINAL-PROGRAM-ABSTRACTSBIOS.pdf

Training Schools

Training schools are a core part of the PIMo network’s mission, empowering postgraduate and early career researchers to develop and apply research skills to conducting new and exciting research. We are very happy to announce that we will be leading three training schools in 2022 and ask you to please share and promote the details with prospective applicants.

PIMo Training School, University of Belgrade, 25-28 May 2022, ‘Empires and Emotions, Rethinking Intellectual and Cultural Transfers/Translations in Southeastern Europe and the Mediterranean (15th-19th Century)’.

The training school in Belgrade will explore this world, divided among different Empires in the Early modern period, and became the place where different thoughts and ideas crossed visible and invisible borders and overcame language barriers finding carriers among people and objects. Thought in motion, captured on paper, represented in an image, or whispered in the ear, created the intellectual bridge that connected Otherness and unified Diversities. Intellectual/cultural transfer and translation became powerful tools for acquiring, expanding, and sharing knowledge and constant companion of human history. The translation was always a human journey through inner and outer worlds, an emotional and intellectual adventure that challenged certainties, prejudices, and personal convictions. It compared languages and contexts, world views, cultures, and empires.

The task of the training school in Belgrade is to shed light on these issues and to equip young scholars with the specific intellectual tools necessary for understanding the central role of translation/cultural transfer in the Mediterranean context and with practical skills for writing grants applications. It aims to explore the “visible and invisible networks” between cultures, religions, and politics in the Mediterranean area from the 15th to 21st century and to show the ways such connections were (and are) artificially separated by political, ideological, and physical borders.

Please see the full Call for details of the eligibility criteria and the application process. Deadline for applications is March 31st 2022: https://www.peopleinmotion-costaction.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/PROGRAM-BELGRADE-Training-School.pdf

PIMo Training School Centro Studi sui Monti di Pietà (Bologna) and Biblioteca Roncioniana (Prato) 24-27 January 2022

Moving Goods for Charity Across the Mediterranean (15th–19th centuries)

The PIMo Training School will investigate the multiple links between economy and charity in the Mediterranean area, from the fifteenth to the early nineteenth century, by investigating the material and immaterial goods that formed the basis for institutions such as: those supported by the legal framework of the waqf in the Islamic and Ottoman societies; Christian hospitals, charitable confraternities, and the Monti di Pietà; and forms of Jewish solidarity, like the collective efforts to redeem Jewish captives. How far can we speak of community economies for this period or even of a sort of welfare system?

The School’s main objective is to offer an opportunity for research development, training, and exchange of ideas for PhD students and postdoctoral researchers working in the fields of Mediterranean Studies, Economic History, Religious Studies, Late Medieval and Early Modern History, and Material Culture. The entangled intellectual, cultural, and material histories of the Mediterranean will be unfolded by following the people, objects, and institutions that were involved in the enterprise of charity or mutual help. This school also aims to provide participants with a critical introduction to some of the most influential interpretative frameworks on these topics and to foster a discussion among trainees about their own research projects.

Call will be available soon here: https://www.peopleinmotion-costaction.org/training-schools/

PIMo WG3 – Summer Training School, Armagnaean Institute Copenhagen 31 August – 3 September 2022

Paper in Motion: Restoration, Conservation, Transmediation

Convened by Prof. José María Pérez Fernández, leader of the Paper in Motion work group, and organized with our host, the Arnamagnaean Institute in Copenhagen, and the collaboration of the Thinking Paper Project at the University of Cambridge

This training school will bring together scholars in the history of paper-based documents, in both manuscript and print, alongside experts in techniques for their conservation and restoration. A third group of trainers will teach seminars on the transmediation of these documents into digital e-texts. All these experts work in institutions, libraries, archives and universities devoted to the study, care and conservation of these documents, many of which were produced in different periods, and above all in different places, frequently very distant from their current locations. The training school will look into the history of some case studies, will trace the paths these books and documents have followed over the course of their history, and examine how this has affected them in material terms. Trainees will attend workshops on traditional paper production techniques, methods and materials for the care and conservation of paper-based documents, and seminars on how their contents are turned into e-texts. In short, the training school offers a unique opportunity to learn about the history and background of these documents in motion, as they also acquire hands-on practical knowledge through close examination of particular case studies, against the overall background of the momentous transition we are undergoing from traditional means of communication on to electronic-digital media.

Trainers will include:

Prof. Matthew Driscoll, and other experts (still to be appointed) from our host, the Arnamagnaean Institute in Copenhagen, Dr. Alessandro Sidoti (Senior Conservator, National Library and Opificio delle Pietre Dure, Florence), Dr. Nil Baydar (Manuscripts Institution of Turkey, Head of the Conservation and Archive Department), Prof. Orietta da Rold, Dr. Suzanne Paul and a third expert (still to be appointed), from Cambridge University Library and the Thinking Paper Project.

Call to be issued soon here: https://www.peopleinmotion-costaction.org/training-schools/

Recent and Ongoing Events
This newsletter comes to you from Lisbon where a group of members have gathered for an exciting Workshop organised by Working Group 1 and hosted by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. The workshop, entitled ‘Objects in the Text and the Text on the Objects’ will investigate these relationships between objects and writing, exploring, on one side, the characteristics and peculiarities of textbearing objects and, on the other side, the different kinds of texts containing lists or descriptions of objects. The focus will be on moving and connecting objects and texts that cross, interact, and often relocate within the Mediterranean in the Early Modern Period. This workshop will also explore how the relationships between objects, writing and their movements, can be connected to the expression of human emotions. Full details can be found here: https://www.peopleinmotion-costaction.org/test/objects-in-the-text-and-the-text-on-the-objects-wg1-workshop-lisbon-24-25th-february/ We were delighted to see the success of our recently launched Digital Exhibition: Paper in Motion, which you can access here: https://www.paperinmotion.org/ We would strongly encourage you to share this excellent resource widely. We commend José María Pérez Fernández, Giovanni Tarantino and Matteo Calcagni for their impressive work on this project.

The PIMo recently hosted a workshop led by Working Group 3 entitled ‘A Web of Sentiments Letter Writing and Gender in the Early Modern Mediterranean‘. The event, hosted by the University of Florence on Monday February 7th, involved a rich and varied discussion that focused in particular on exploring how female epistolography furnished discursive practices that facilitated not just the creation of private and public personae, but also textual spaces for shared sentiments, and consequently the creation of communities in which women sought to negotiate social and emotional spaces of their own. Full details can be found here: https://www.peopleinmotion-costaction.org/test/a-web-of-sentiments-letter-writing-and-gender-in-the-early-modern-mediterranean-university-of-florence-monday-february-7th/

Finally, Working Group 2 recently hosted a very successful workshop at the European University Institute entitled ‘Translators, Translations and Mobility in the Mediterranean‘. This event included speakers of a diverse range of disciplinary backgrounds covering translation as a process and a form of social relation intimately connected to mobility across a variety of temporal and geographical spaces. Further details can be found here: https://www.peopleinmotion-costaction.org/test/translators-translations-and-mobility-in-the-mediterranean-wg2-workshop-european-university-institute-31-01-01-02-2022florence/

The productivity of the PIMo network means there is always some exciting event or publication on the horizon so please do check out our website regularly to keep up to date.

All the best,

PIMo Core Group