Literatures of the Sea

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The premodern Mediterranean was a site of civilizational confluence, conflict, and transformation, which historians have characterized as both fragmentation and connectivity. This course addresses tales of love, sex, and slavery in medieval and early modern Mediterranean literatures. Love and slaverytwo forms of captivityallow us to study religious and cultural interactions, voluntary and involuntary movement across the sea, and the production and articulation of difference. Adopting a Mediterranean Studies lens, this course aims to define what it means to think Mediterranean by reading and analyzing texts from a diverse body of languages and literatures, including Arabic, Aljamiado, French, Italian, Latin, Persian, and Spanish.