Minor in Mediterranean Studies

  • The Minor in Mediterranean Studies is a flexible course of study intended to introduce students to the various facets of the Mediterranean Sea from a cross-disciplinary perspective. Drawing on courses from within the Italian Department as well as departments and units across the university, the program seeks to enhance students’ understanding of this culturally diverse and politically important region of the world. It offers them the opportunity to explore the connections among the peoples living in this geographic area over a broad chronological span—from prehistoric times to the present—and to focus on issues that go beyond specific nations, cultures, and states, such as migration, cultural transfers, diversity, multilingualism, translation, border crossing, empires and colonialism, circulation of goods and ideas, islands, the physical environment, and resource management.

 

  • The learning goals of the Minor in Mediterranean Studies are therefore: 1) to give students vital tools for thinking about the world from the perspective of an interconnected sea space and through a comparative and transnational point of view; and 2) to help students gain a deeper understanding of the history, and culture of the Mediterranean through an interdisciplinary path of study. Upon completion of the Minor, students should be able to have a basic knowledge of the ways in which the Mediterranean Sea has served over time as a medium of contact, exchange, and interaction among multiple societies, nations, religions, and languages, and use this knowledge to reconsider global relations in the world today.

Design

The Minor in Mediterranean Studies requires a minimum of 15 points (5 courses). 

There are no prerequisites.

Minors in Mediterranean Studies are required to take the following two-semester sequence (not necessarily taken in progressive order). This sequence also fulfills the Global Core requirement:

  • Mediterranean Humanities I (CLIA GU4499)

Course description: Mediterranean Humanities I explores the literatures of the Mediterranean from the late Middle Ages to the Early Nineteenth Century. We will read Boccaccio, and Cervantes, as well as Ottoman poetry, Iberian Muslim apocalyptic literature, and the Eurasian connected versions of the One Thousand and One Nights. We will dive into the travel of texts and people, stories and storytellers across the shores of the Middle Sea. Based on the reading of literary texts (love poetry, short stories, theater, and travel literature), as well as letters, biographies, memoirs, and other ego-documents produced and consumed in the Early Modern Mediterranean, we will discuss big themes such as Orientalism, estrangement, forced mobility, connectivity, multiculturalism and the clash of civilizations. Also, following in the footsteps of Fernand Braudel and Erich Auerbach, we will reflect on the Mediterranean in the age of the first globalization as a laboratory of the modern global world and world literature.    

  • Mediterranean Humanities II (CLIA GU4500)

Course description: What is the Mediterranean and how was it constructed and canonized as a space of civilization? A highly multicultural, multilingual area whose people represent a broad array of religious, ethnic, social and political differences, the Mediterranean has been seen as the cradle of western civilization, but also as a dividing border and a unifying confluence zone: as a sea of pleasure and a sea of death. The course aims to enhance students’ understanding of the multiple ways this body of water has been imagined by the people who lived or traveled across its shores. By exploring major works of theory, literature and cinema since 1800, it encourages students to engage critically with a number of questions (nationalism vs cosmopolitanism, South/North and East/West divides, tourism, exile and migration, colonialism and orientalism, borders and divided societies) and to ‘read’ the sea through different viewpoints. In the final analysis, Med Hum II is meant to engage the question of what it means to stand on watery grounds and to view the world through a constantly shifting lens.

In addition to these two Global Core courses, students pursuing the Minor in Mediterranean Studies will take three elective courses. One should be from the Mediterranean offerings of the Italian Department, while the other two can be from other departments and units across the university. The approved courses should adopt a Mediterranean transnational, comparative or regional perspective, engage with issues on a cross-Mediterranean scale (such as migration, cultural transfers, translation, borders, contacts and conflicts, empires and colonialism, islands, circulation of goods and ideas, common environmental and resource management questions), or place their particular topics within a Mediterranean framework (at least 50% of the course material should fulfill these requirements).

Students pursuing a Minor in Mediterranean Studies should download and use the relevant worksheet.

2024-2027

Chair: 

Konstantina Zanou (Director of Undergraduate Studies, Department of Italian)

 

Members: 

Naor H. Ben-Yehoyada (Director of Undergraduate Studies, Department of Anthropology)

Nikolas P. Kakkoufa (Director of Undergraduate Studies, Department of Classics and The Program in Hellenic Studies)