“Faking It!” invites specialists from across disciplines to think expansively about the historical motives, methods, milieus and meaning of imposture in and around the Inner Sea. Falsifying specimens, counterfeiting coinage, claiming expertise, feigning faith, concealing origins all implicated questions of identity, knowledge, authenticity, legitimacy and authority. So did the acts of unmasking, debunking and exposing. What can the construction and contestation of lies teach us about the premodern Mediterranean and vice versa?
Proposals are welcome from scholars of all ranks from across all disciplines of the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, as are papers from the Sciences, that engage in the broadest sense with social, historical and cultural aspects of the Mediterranean language, linguistics, literature, culture, society, art, and social, economic and political history, as well as anthropology, sociology, and other related humanities and social science disciplines. Junior scholars, graduate students, contingent faculty, scholars of underrepresented communities, and those whose work engages with historiographically marginalized groups are particularly encouraged to apply. For this meeting we particularly encourage European scholars to apply.
Papers may address either specific case studies or larger historical or historiographical dynamics and apparatuses. Comparative, interdisciplinary, and methodologically innovative papers are of particular interest. Our Mediterranean is construed geographically as including southern Europe, the Near East and North Africa and stretching into the Black Sea and Central Asia, and the Red Sea and the western Indian ocean. While our primary laboratory is the premodern Mediterranean, we welcome proposals from across historical eras, as well papers which focus on other regions in which analogous or related processes can be observed.
1) Mediterranean Misrepresentations: In what ways was the Mediterranean social, cultural, political, religious and economic environment conducive to dissimulation? What was its impact?
2) Misrepresenting the Mediterranean: How has the Mediterranean past or Mediterranean culture been misrepresented, deliberately or not? What does this tell us about the Mediterranean or ourselves?
3) Masking and Unmasking: How did contemporaries see misrepresentation, fraud and forgery? In what contexts and how did they seek to control or encourage it to what effect? What do we learn from studying technologies of deception?
