Renegades, Turncoats, and Converts in the Pre-Modern Mediterranean, panel at the 133rd Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association, Chicago, January 3–6, 2019

The special topic of the 133rd Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association to be held 3-6 January 2019 in Chicago is “Loyalties.” This coincides with the meeting of the Modern Language Association, and registrees at either conference may attend and participate in the other.

The Mediterranean Seminar is seeking paper proposals for two integrated sessions to be proposed, one at each conference, entitled, “Renegades, Turncoats, and Converts in the Pre-Modern Mediterranean.”

Scholars of the pre-Modern West have long regarded categories of religious identity as a fundamental to Islamic, Christian and Jewish societies in Europe, North Africa and the Near East. Recent scholarship has shown, however, that such identities were fungible and often ambiguous, and that individuals sometimes either “commuted” between ethno-religious affiliations or manifested two or more of such identities simultaneously.

We are looking for papers in historical and literary disciplines (including art history, archeology, and cultural studies) or from any humanities perspective that examine individuals or groups that transgressed communal boundaries, either openly or deceptively. What were their motives? How were they perceived of by their new communities and by their old communities? What was the cost of transgressing boundaries of identity? Can we speak about “hybrid” cultures and identities? And so on. Inter-disciplinary, comparative, and methodological papers are particularly welcome.