Mediterranean Topographies before Balkanization

I place my work under the rubric of spatial studies: an investigation of how people inhabit their world. The corner of the world I examine is the northeastern Mediterranean, a highly contested region that has brought into contact numerous peoples: Greek, Persian, and Roman in ancient times; Byzantine, Slavic, Arabic, Venetian, Frankish, Jewish, Armenian, and Ottoman in the late ancient to early modern period; and Greek, Turkish, Slavic, and Albanian in our own times. Literature is my point of entry into that world. Though it is unusual in spatial studies, an area of inquiry dominated by geography, architecture, environmental psychology, political theory, and anthropology, I find the literary approach quite useful. For literature has always occupied itself with topographia or topothesia, the "description" or "situation of place" (Curtius 200). Literature relies on historical and geographical spatiality to orient its readers and send them on its imaginative journey

Ancient history · Archaeology · Armenian · Byzantine architecture · Diaspora · Geography · Persian · Politics · Rubric · Slavic languages · Sociology · Turkish · Byzantine Studies and History · Classics · History · Philosophy · Architecture