Mediterranean Crossroads Program

Mediterranean Crossroads

Mediterranean Crossroads is a faculty-led program organized through the Center for Middle Eastern Studies that runs every other year, alternating with the Tracking Cultures program.

Information on the 2007 program is presented here for your information, however, interested students should bear in mind that the information below -- including cost, instructors, dates, and host countries -- applies only to the 2007 program.

Program

Mediterranean Crossroads takes students beyond the classroom, beyond study abroad. You are invited to participate in this unique interdisciplinary program that is open to graduate and undergraduate students at The University of Texas at Austin. This one-of-a-kind educational experience will provide you with a deep and first-hand understanding of the lands around the Mediterranean and the complex interactions between them, from antiquity to the present. This program combines classroom learning in the spring and fall semester with summer field experience in Sicily and Morocco under the leadership of UT faculty and local experts.

Download a brochure, including application forms (PDF, 1.2MB)

Topic

The Mediterranean has linked the lands around its shores for thousands of years. The nations that now surround it owe a great deal to that dynamic environment of contact and exchange, and they still bear witness to its complexity and diversity. This program will explore the underlying connections among Mediterranean societies and cultures, even as current discourse tends to emphasize the differences between them.

Aim

Mediterranean Crossroads will engage you in issues of culture, politics, economics, art and daily life far beyond our own borders. Together they will allow you to approach the Mediterranean world, in whole and in its parts, with an interdisciplinary and comparative eye. You will explore patterns in forming identity and structuring community past and present. How did people in the Mediterranean lands live and organize their societies, despite ethnic and religious differences? How did they reconcile their private lives with public demands?

Direct, personal experience with the culture of the Mediterranean will enrich your understanding of the complex forces that have shaped the past and present. This understanding will, in turn, provide deeper insight into issues of global relevance: the uses of the past, the construction of identity in the present, the barriers that separate societies and the common threads that bring cultures together.

On a basic level, this program will help you see how other people live, and have lived, in contexts very different from our own. At the same time, you will examine some of the unique ways the inhabitants of the region have structured their lives and their societies in different places and at different times. As many contemporary Mediterranean states try to reconcile their pasts with the challenges of the modern world, you will have a privileged view of the construction of identity and the fluidity of culture in the present.

The 2007 Mediterranean Crossroads program, Private Lives, Public Spaces: Patterns across Morocco and Sicily will be conducted under the leadership of Prof. Samer Ali of Arabic, Islamic, and Middle Eastern Studies, and Prof. Adam Rabinowitz of Classics and Assistant Director of the Institute of Classical Archaeology.

The Mediterranean Crossroads Program is organized by the Center for Middle Eastern Studies with generous support from the Department of Classics and the College of Liberal Arts.