Outsiders, Converts, and Intermediaries between Europe and the Islamicate Mediterranean, 1500–1800

Outsiders, Converts, and Mediators gathers scholars from Edinburgh, Newcastle, Manchester, Birmingham, Sheffield, Bergen and Melbourne to study the people who carried goods, texts, faith and law between Europe and the Ottoman world. Interpreters, religious converts, brokers, and captives did the daily work of connection between cultures and societies, repeatedly reinventing themselves in pursuit of their goals, and for this reason are often obscure, shadowy figures captured in the archives of hostile or indifferent interlocutors. This workshop places the outsider at the centre, drawing on close archival research in archives across Europe and the Mediterranean to tell new stories of cross-cultural engagement and social mobility in a fluid Mediterranean world. We ask three key questions: how did these fluid personalities harness the capacities, powers, and institutions available to them to achieve their goals; what did crossing boundaries cost or earn them; and how should we conceptualise these figures and their legacies in light of conventional historical paradigms? Three panels of full-length papers are followed by one panel of graduate student lightning talks with a formal response, and then an hour of open discussion and planning for future collaboration and publication.