A core program conference at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library
—organized by Clark Professor Barbara Fuchs (UCLA)

Friday, May 4th

Core Program

The program involves humanities scholars whose research interests relate to the representation of empire and imperial rivalry in the early modern Mediterranean. The field of Mediterranean studies has grown tremendously in recent years, with rich investigations both within the national disciplines and in a comparative framework, placing empires side by side. This series will focus on the imbrication and entanglement of the various actors in the early modern Mediterranean (the Ottoman and the Habsburg empires, Portugal, Morocco, France, England, Venice, and so forth). How is imperial competition managed in different genres? How do literary and cultural productions render the alterity and the attraction of the cultures encountered? Rivalry and Rhetoric will feature three symposia that take us from the broadest problems of representation to a case study—early modern England—for which the "Mediterranean turn" has radically changed the field.

Session 3—Imagining the Mediterranean in Early Modern England

This conference explores how England engages the Mediterranean as conceptual space, and how this engagement intersects with those of other European nations. What role does the representation of Mediterranean empire serve in thinking through England's own expansion? How is the threat of the Mediterranean negotiated in various genres? How has the canon of early modern English writing changed in response to the Mediterranean turn of recent years? Topics will include the geography of revenge tragedy, Iberian tragedies, Shakespeare's Mediterranean, Machiavellianism on stage, Spanish plots and plotting-Spaniards, translation and appropriation.