New MRG: Ancient Mediterranean Borderlands

New MRG: Ancient Mediterranean Borderlands

The IHC congratulates Elizabeth DePalma Digeser (Religious Studies) and her collaborators in the Ancient Mediterranean Borderlands Multicampus Research Group.  The Group is one of four grantees in the UC Humanities Network’s 2011-2012 MRG competition. For further information on the MRG competition, please click here.
The Places Between: Ancient Mediterranean Borderlands
PI: Elizabeth DePalma Digeser, UC Santa Barbara

Co-directors/Steering Committee:
Chair: Elizabeth Digeser, Associate Professor in History, UCSB
Ra’anan Boustan, Associate Professor in History and Near Eastern Languages & Literatures, UCLA
Touraj Daryaee, Professor in History, UCI
Dayna Kalleres, Assistant Professor in Literature, UCSD
Lynn Roller, Professor in Art History, UCD
Michele Salzman, Professor in History, UCR

The Ancient Mediterranean world is often portrayed as a place of stark oppositions and unyielding boundaries between groups: Civilized versus barbarian. Greeks versus Persians. Pagans versus Christians. Conflicts such as these constructed the borderlands where much of Mediterranean history played out: spaces both physical and conceptual where no single power exerted overriding hegemonic domination.

Although our research focuses on the ancient world, the questions we explore possess enduring significance: What is the relationship between contested religious or ethnic identities and internecine violence? Does imperialism foster the formation of rebellious ethnic or religious identities, both at the center of power and in the periphery? How might multiple identities form in a contested frontier region, and how might such borderlands peoples complicate the relationship between contending powers? Our group also stretches beyond the traditional Greek and Roman focus of ancient Mediterranean history to include scholars working on ancient Persia/Iran, indigenous peoples of western Asia Minor (Turkey), the Near East (e.g., the Levant), and Egypt.