PIMo Newsletter, May 2022

As the end of another academic year approaches (at least for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere), the PIMo network is proud to look back on all of our achievements over the last twelve months and look forward to many exciting events, funding opportunities and publications yet to come.

Below you can find details of our upcoming training schools, one of which is still accepting applications from potential participants. You will also see details of future workshops, including one that is still open to potential participants.

We are also delighted to share information about the upcoming Third Biennial Conference of the Society for the History of Emotions, on the theme of “Going Places: Mobility, Migration, Exile, Space and Emotions:” jointly convened by the University of Florence, the European University Institute and PIMo.

As ever, we encourage network members to actively participate in our activities where possible. Please continue to check out our website, which is regularly updated with information about our events, recent publications and funding opportunities, as well as the fascinating Visual Reflections produced by network members.

Wishing you all the best,
PIMo Core Team
The PIMo network is delighted to jointly convene the Third Biennial Conference of the Society for the History of Emotions, on the theme of “Going Places: Mobility, Migration, Exile, Space and Emotions:” with our partners at the University of Florence and the European University Institute. This major event will take place in Florence from August 30 to September 02 2022.

Full details can be found here:  https://societyhistoryemotions.com/she-conference-2022/

Training Schools

The PIMo project continues to welcome applications from graduate students for the following training school. Please share these for applications widely within your networks.

Paper in Motion: Restoration, Conservation, Transmediation
PIMo WG3 – Summer Training School, Armagnaean Institute, Copenhagen,
31 August – 3 September 2022

Call Deadline June 7th

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.

The Training School Programme and full Call for Papers can be accessed here:
https://www.peopleinmotion-costaction.org/test/paper-in-motion-restoration-conservation-transmediation-wg3-summer-training-school-armagnaean-institute-copenhagen-31-august-3-september-2022/

PIMo will be hosting two training schools in the coming months, the details of which can be found below:

Moving Goods for Charity Across the Mediterranean (15th–19th centuries,) PIMo Training School, Centro Studi sui Monti di Pietà (Bologna), 13–16 June 2022

Within the interconnected space of the Mediterranean – “probably the most vigorous place of interaction between different societies on the face of this planet”, according to David Abulafia – different communities dealt with the weak, the poor, and those in (even momentary) need by developing distinct and yet comparable responses. The PIMo Training School aims to explore which kinds of institutions and practices – in the name of the inner solidarity of a local community or of the broader call to help everyone – were put in place and how they were supported, both economically and conceptually. More concretely, how to move and use goods or objects (and which ones) for charity? How to persuade people that organized solidarity was a highly rewarding investment? Which role did different religious traditions (Jewish, Christian, Islamic) play in these dynamics? To what extent is a comparative approach not only possible but also necessary in order to rethink and reframe the whole process?

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?

Full details can be found here: https://www.peopleinmotion-costaction.org/test/moving-goods-for-charity-across-the-mediterranean-15th-19th-centuries-pimo-training-school-centro-studi-sui-monti-di-pieta-bologna-13-16-june-2022/

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

The broad world of Southeastern Europe and the Mediterranean from ancient times nourished the great stories that spanned over distant times and places. The focus of the research done within the Cost Action 18140 People in Motion: Entangled Histories of Displacement across the Mediterranean, or PIMo, explores common forms of displacement and dispossession across the Mediterranean from the fifteenth century to the present.

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.

Full details available here: https://www.peopleinmotion-costaction.org/test/empires-and-emotions-rethinking-intellectual-and-cultural-transfers-translations-in-southeastern-europe-and-the-mediterranean-15th-19th-century-university-of-belgrade-25-28-may-2022/

 
Upcoming Events
PIMo has a number of fascinating workshops coming up in the next few months, a testament to the wealth of the knowledge exchange facilitated by our network.

Travelling Matters: Rereading, Reshaping, Reusing Objects Across The Mediterranean, Haifa, HCMC 8th September 2022

Full Call for Papers Available Here: CfP with deadline July 15th

The workshop “Travelling matters: rereading, reshaping, reusing objects across the Mediterranean” intends to tackle objects as sources and subjects of the history of cross-cultural encounters in innovative ways. Primarily, we intend to discuss objects flowing in all directions, thus avoiding the kind of narrowing perspectives embedded in the study of one-way routes, such as that which goes from the North to the South or from the East to the West. Moreover, the category of objects as we understand it should be as large as possible, including items such as food, drugs, books, manuscripts, maps, antiques, human remains and relics (as objects to study, ancestors to bury or to worship), clothing, minerals, plants, fossils, tools and scientific instruments, objects of use and objects in precious materials. The materiality and mobility of such items should be underscored along with the practises and knowledges with which they are intertwined.

Secondly, we wish to concentrate on the “second-handedness” of displaced objects: in other words, how and why moving objects acquire new functions and new meanings as they are displaced and with what consequences for the relations between the communities involved? How and why displaced objects can be lost or forgotten just so that they can later re-emerge and be repurposed? What kind of relationship can be established between such repurposing on the one side, and political or cultural change on the other? In which ways do these processes affect and are affected by the historical shaping of individual and collective identities? What kind of emotional investments in the objects (thoughts, feelings, and behaviours) accompany their possession, their peregrinations, their reclaims? Were the objects used for nation- building, trying to create a national identity, or on the contrary for affirming local and regional identities in tension with the national and centralising one?

Both these perspectives demand a broad chronology, extending from antiquity to the present-day, and for the intersection between different time frames, from the relatively narrow scale of individual objects being displaced across the Mediterranean to the much larger one of the histories of their reinterpretation and repurposing.

Away from Home: Ideas, Emotions, Images and Writings on Homesickness in the Mediterranean World (1492-1923), National Library of Portugal, Lisbon (BNP), 20-21 June 2022

Homesickness is a sentiment, and an idea shared by societies around the Mediterranean, and felt by individuals and communities alike, either temporarily or permanently; particularly in a geography marked by the voluntary and involuntary displacement of people across the political, cultural and religious divide since Antiquity. Being away from home triggers a vast array of situations and feelings, like nostalgia manifested by narratives, art, patterns of consumption, etc.; or the attempt to keep the identity in face of a different set of values in the place one is living as an exile or as an expatriate; namely through the endeavor to build Home away from Home; and to maintain contact with Home exchanging writings, presents, etc.

It is our aim to see how and to understand why, despite Globalization, Cosmopolitanism, and the growing circulation of people (like travelers, traders, pilgrims, students, scientists, tourists), and the exchange of ideas across national, cultural and religious divides, individual and communities still maintained their entangled relationship with Home, either in a real or constructed image and discourse, through time. For that we invite scholars to explore all available media that reveals Homesickness to participate in this congress.

Full details available here: https://www.peopleinmotion-costaction.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Conference-Programme-Lisbon-20-21-June.pdf

European Sea Spaces and Histories of Knowledge, Helsinki and Tallinn, 22 – 23 June 2022

Full details here: Programme Helsinki and Tallinn

In partnership with the University of Helsinki and the University of Tallinn

Long before the recent turn towards environmental history, writing of the seas has encouraged temporal, spatial and analytical flexibility among historians. Fernand Braudel famously went far back and forth in time, from his main focus on the sixteenth-century Mediterranean, inspiring historians to sketch global histories of capitalism with the sea as their canvas. The maritime lens enabled scholars, writers, and thinkers to situate local histories in a broader regional, and ultimately global or planetary, framework.

 

The tendency to dissolve established disciplinary and epochal categories, often accompanied by the blurring of boundaries between social, human, natural, and material histories, owes much to the specific place occupied by the sea as a metaphor for the unbounded and the limitless. Sea spaces have been overdetermined since antiquity: The regional and local, often combined with specialized, intimate knowledge of geographical conditions, always already connotes the non-space and the world ocean, the inaccessible and the endlessly accessible, hybridity and separation, boredom and danger, the pragmatic and the sublime, the space that is divinely prohibited and the space that grants freedom to all. As a legal space, the sea is a patchwork of multiple regimes of regulation, from private to international laws, decreed by multiple actors. As a space of transfers, the sea has not only been marked by transports of material goods but also of ideas, which have always crossed the sea spaces of the world, at least the more accessible ones. Yet in the era of late modern nation-states, coinciding with improvements in land-based communications, the notion of the sea as limit and boundary has become ever more accentuated, so much so that it threatened to eclipse the significance of the maritime in historical discourse, and despite numerous efforts to reverse this effect, the dominance of land-based perspectives remains acute. Competing ways of framing maritime history were nourished by geopolitical tension.

 

This conference highlights the uneven chronologies and modalities that frame the historiographies of the Mediterranean, the Baltic, the Black Sea, and the North Sea, the inland or epeiric seas of Europe. Much weight has historically been placed, especially in intellectual as well as economic history, on the interconnections generated by the Atlantic space, both in Anglophone and Latin American histories. Comparatively, the epeiric seas have been relegated, for the early and late modern periods, to secondary status. From a maritime perspective, Eurocentrism has arguably been an Atlanto-centrism with a clear preference for the Atlantic Empires of Western Europe. Global historical work, seeking to shift the focus away from Eurocentric perspectives, has in recent years proposed to right this one-sidedness by highlighting histories of the Indian Ocean, in particular. In this situation, it may well also be appropriate, with a view to the global connections and the revision of Atlanto-centrism, to also revisit the inland seas of the European continental space.