Asia and the Mediterranean World

Date: 12-14 June, 2023
Venue: Villa La Pietra, NYU Florence

The Macedonian ruler Alexander’s military expansion across western Asia all the way to the northwestern regions of present-day India in the 4th century BCE triggered multiple forms of connections within the Eurasian world. This included the circulation of people, objects, and ideas, the impact of which reached Southeast and East Asia. During the later periods, Persian and Arab traders, South and Southeast Asian spices and Chinese porcelain, European colonizers and missionaries, Indian and Chinese migrants, and more recently the Project Mausam started by the Indian government and the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) launched by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) have integrated the Asian and the Mediterranean worlds. However, as Ibn Battuta’s travels from Morocco to China in the 14th century indicate, actors from the African continent were also an integral part of this integrated world. Janet Abu-Lughod’s Before European Hegemony has brilliantly conceptualized the complexities of such “Afroeurasian” connections before colonial connections. This conference explores these longue durée Eurasian/Afroeurasian connections through five panels and two keynote address.

The objective of the conference panels and the keynote addresses is, on the one hand, to understand the state of research on Eurasian/Afroeurasian interactions, and on the other hand to identify topics for future collaboration and curricular development within NYU’s Global Network University (GNU) platform. The roundtable for NYU GNU participants scheduled on the third day of the conference will be devoted to discussing these future collaborations and curricular development. The conference is intended to facilitate academic exchanges, foster future research, and produce deliverables to mark the academic content of event and establish a model for future NYU GNU collaborations.

Supported by
Global Opportunity Grant and Global Research Initiatives, NYU
Provost's Funds, NYU Shanghai
Henry Luce Foundation
Global Asia Programs in Abu Dhabi, New York, and Shanghai

Please RSVP via lapietra.events@nyu.edu, and specify which session/day you would like to participate.

Program

Monday, 12 June 2023

Chair: Duane Corpis (NYU Shanghai)

10:30AM-10:50AM

David Ludden (NYU)

The Mobility of Asia in Mediterranean Spaces

10:50AM-11:10AM

Norman Underwood (Florida State University-Panama City)

Peppering Roman Relations: Spice Exchange among Peasants, Traders, and Patrons

11:10AM-11:30AM

Pia Brancaccio (Drexel University)

Buddhist India and the Mediterranean at the Beginning of the Common Era

11:30AM-12:00PM

Discussion

Chair: Nelida Fuccaro (NYU Abu Dhabi)

2:00PM-2:20PM

Hyoungee Kong (NYU Shanghai)

Fantastically Queer Touches: Ideas of Japan and the Kimonomanie in Belle Epoque France

2:20PM-2:40PM

Marcella Simoni (Ca’Foscari University)

Transnational Jews in South, East and Southeast Asia: Individuals, the Press and Some Ideas (1850-1950)

2:40PM-3:00PM

Toral Jatin Gajarawala (NYU Abu Dhabi)

The Black Nudes

3:00PM-3:30PM

Discussion

4:30PM-6:00PM

Nicola Di Cosmo (Institute for Advanced Study)

Revisiting the Veneto-Genoese Embargo against the Golden Horde: A Prisoner’s Dilemma

Chair: David Ludden (NYU)

Tuesday, 13 June 2023

Chair: Hyoungee Kong (NYU Shanghai) 

10:00AM-10:20AM

Miriam Castorina (University of Florence)

Unread Memories: Chinese Travel Narratives about Italy throughout the Centuries

10:20AM-10:40AM

Gaoheng Zhang (University of British Columbia)

What does ‘Italian Cuisine’ Mean in China: A Media and Cultural Studies Approach

10:40AM-11:00AM

Duane Corpis (NYU Shanghai)

Foreign Soundscapes: German Travelers in the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean

11:00AM-11:20AM

Masha Kirasirova (NYU Abu Dhabi)

Niriddin Mukhitdinov: A Soviet Central Asian Mediator in the Middle East

11:20AM-12:00PM

Discussion

Chair: Marcella Simoni (Ca’Foscari University) 

1:30PM-1:50PM

Mahnaz Yousefzadeh (NYU)

Florence and the Persianate World in Global Early Modernity

1:50PM-2:10PM

Larry Wolff (NYU/NYU Florence)

Ottoman Turks on the Operatic Mediterranean

2:10PM-2:30PM

Ayşe Baltacıoğlu-Brammer (NYU)

Exiling Heresy to Cyprus: Ottoman Qizilbash and the Population Policies of the State

2:30PM-3:00PM

Discussion

Chair: Philippe Le Corre (Asia Society Policy Institute) 

3:00PM-3:20PM

Davide Orazio Lombardo (NYU Florence)

“The Kitten and the Six-Feeted” and Other Marvelous Stories from Underground: Enrico Mattei’s Inter-national Strategy for Energy and Natural Resources, Imperialism, and Cold War

3:20PM-3:40PM

Stephen Gross (NYU)

The Rise and the Risks of Eurasian Natural Gas Links: 1990-2015

3:40PM-4:00PM

Maria Adele Carrai (NYU Shanghai)

China’s Belt and Road Initiative and Its Connecting Strategy in the Mediterranean

4:00PM-4:20PM

Yifei Li (NYU Shanghai)

Eurasia with Chinese Characteristics: Cultural and Scientific Appropriation in Belt and Road Tourism and Archaeology

4:20PM-5:00PM

Discussion

6:00PM-7:30PM 

Joanna Waley-Cohen (NYU Shanghai) 

Sharing Beauty: China in Italy in Premodern Times 

Chair: Larry Wolff (NYU/NYU Florence) 

Wednesday, 14 June 2023

1. Collaborative research: Harold Acton and Asia

2. Undergraduate curriculum: Possible co-taught, cross-GNU course on Marco Polo

3. PhD program: Global Asia/Global Crossroads (based at NYU Abu Dhabi)

Abstracts and Bios

Monday, 12 June 2023

Bio
Tansen Sen is Director of the Center for Global Asia, Professor of History, NYU Shanghai; Associated Professor of History, NYU. He specializes in Asian history and religions and has special scholarly interests in India-China interactions, Indian Ocean connections, and Buddhism. He is the author of Buddhism, Diplomacy, and Trade: The Realignment of Sino-Indian Relations, 600-1400 (2003; 2016) and India, China, and the World: A Connected History (2017). He has co-authored (with Victor H. Mair) Traditional China in Asian and World History (2012) and edited Buddhism Across Asia: Networks of Material, Cultural and Intellectual Exchange (2014). He is currently working on a book about Zheng He’s maritime expeditions in the early fifteenth century and co-editing (with Engseng Ho) the Cambridge History of the Indian Ocean, volume 1.

Panel 1: Mobilities and Exchanges

Bio
Duane Corpis is an Associate Professor of History, NYU Shanghai; Global Network Associate Professor, NYU. Prior to joining NYU Shanghai, he was an Assistant Professor at Cornell University. He holds a PhD from New York University. Professor Corpis is recipient of the 2013-2014 Smith Book Award from the Southern Historical Association and the 2013 Hans Rosenberg Article Prize from the Central European History Society. He has been an NEH Humanities Summer Scholar, a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Central European University, and a Herzog Ernst Fellow at the Gotha Research Center and Library. He also serves on the Editorial Collective of the journal Radical History Review.

Bio
Professor of History, NYU, Director of the New York Center for Global Asia

Abstract
This presentation provides a quick overview of Asia’s mobile spatial forms as they embrace the Mediterranean from ancient to modern times.

Bio
Norman Underwood is a historian of late Roman social and economic history with a particular interest in Roman occupational culture and practices. He has written on barbarian mercenary culture, the social power of scribes, the cost and finances of Roman healthcare, and the labor market of ancient Christian clerics. After teaching at NYU as a visiting assistant professor, he now adjuncts at FSU-Panama City and helps manage a family seafood-distribution business.

Abstract
By the first century CE Indian pepper had become a staple of the Roman food economy and culinary culture. An Intricate network of independent merchants, state functionaries, and semi-public organizations had transformed a once-exotic luxury into a widely accessible and affordable commodity. As portable and durable goods with a foreign aura, pepper evolved in its own right as a prominent medium for ritualized acts of quotidian benefaction, gift-giving, reciprocity. Given the scale of operations, communities of spice traders and those who patronized them have bequeathed for posterity a plethora of material artifacts from papyrus receipts to embellished cookware and pepper-decorated funerary sculptures, artifacts that have for too long factored little into the study of Indo-Roman trade. In remedying this academic shortcoming, this paper will trace the social contours of these “spice communities” and distribution networks through a close analysis of the surviving papyrological and epigraphic evidence for Roman épicurie culture of the High and Late Empire (98-608 CE). As will be evident, the social institutions and practices undergirding pepper exchange were deeply engrained in Roman culture across the social strata, painting a picture of a long-term, reliable pepper distribution network. As the numerous chronologically late pieces will further demonstrate, the Roman taste for pepper very much endured through the cataclysms of Late Antiquity. The paper will conclude with the suggestion that Medieval conspicuous consumption of pepper and its function in gestures of gift-gifting were not sui generis but elite retentions of everyday Roman practices. 

Bio
Pia Brancaccio is Professor of Art History at Drexel University, Philadelphia, USA. Her research focuses on early Buddhist art and cross-cultural exchange in South Asia with a regional emphasis on the visual cultures of ancient Gandhara (Pakistan) and the Deccan Plateau (India), and the Indian Ocean exchange networks. She has published extensively on the Buddhist caves in Western Deccan, including a monograph on The Buddhist Caves at Aurangabad (2010) and the edited volume Living Rock (2013). She has been also a longstanding collaborator of the ISMEO-Italian Archaeological Mission in Pakistan and co-edited the book Gandharan Buddhism: Art, Archaeology (2006). She is currently working on a book project dedicated to early Buddhist monasteries and visual traditions in Western India.

Abstract
The proposed paper focuses on the involvement of early Buddhist communities in thriving Indo-Mediterranean trade beginning with the first century CE. The epigraphic and artistic evidence as well as the material culture associated with Buddhist establishments on the west coast of India and the Deccan Plateau suggests that at the time of the Satavahanas until the third c. CE, Buddhist establishments were participants in the Indo-Mediterranean exchange system. Buddhist monastic communities were positioned in strategic areas that supplied materials and natural resources destined for remunerative Indo-Mediterranean trade, and in turn they became permeable environments to the reception and recontextualization of Western artistic models.

Panel 2: Transnationalities and Proximities

Bio
Professor Fuccaro specializes in the history of the modern Middle East with a focus on the Arab World, particularly Iraq, the Arab States of the Persian Gulf, Arabian Peninsula, and Kurdistan. Although a regional specialist, she has a keen interest in cross-regional and inter-disciplinary approaches to the study of urban history, oil societies and cultures, public violence, and historical borderlands. She is the author of The Other Kurds: Yazidis in Colonial Iraq (IB Tauris 1999), Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf: Manama since 1800 (Cambridge University Press 2009); co-editor of  Urban Violence in the Middle East: Changing Cityscapes in the Transition from Empire to Nation State (Berghahn, 2015); editor of ‘Histories of Oil and Urban Modernity in the Middle East’ (thematic issue in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 2013) and Violence and the City in the Modern Middle East (Stanford University Press, 2016).  She has also published articles on port cities, colonial knowledge, ethnicity, and nationalism.

Bio
Hyoungee Kong is an Assistant Professor Faculty Fellow of Art History at NYU Shanghai. She received her PhD in Art History from the Pennsylvania State University. Her work focuses broadly on queer subjectivities that formed through cross-cultural consumption between East Asia and the West. Her primary research and teaching areas include visual and material cultures of France and Japan in the nineteenth–twentieth centuries; gender and sexuality studies; queer theory; and history of photography in East Asia. Kong’s current book project, Fleshly Japonisme, examines queer potentials of japonisme, or the Western taste for Japan, that catered to middle-class women in Belle Epoque France. Through intermedial analyses of advertisements, paintings, postcards, garments, and literature, the book explores the ways that ideas of Japan helped these women reimagine their bodily pleasures and desires beyond Western bourgeois conventions of femininity.

Abstract
The critical role of stereotyping the exotic to the subjectification in modern Western contexts has been widely recognized in scholarships across disciplines. Fin-de-siècle Parisian lesbians, for instance, enacted stereotypical figures of hyper-sensual Oriental women as theatrical personae under which their sexual desire could be expressed. What has been glossed over is the ways japonisme, the taste for Japan that swept across belle époque France, allowed non-heteronormative subjectification for women. Addressing this gap, this paper examines significations of performing femininity à la japonaise for fin-de-siècle Parisian bourgeoises by paying particular attention to kimonomanie, the vogue for the kimono in fashion. It analyzes representations of the kimono and kimono-donning female bodies in visual and material cultures and literature in the 1870s­–1910s. I suggest that robe japonaise, figured in the French imaginary as the quintessence of Japanese femininity, provided Parisiennes occasions to enact the love-oriented and tenderhearted construct of the Japanese woman and parody some aspects of heteronormative femininity. Simultaneously, the kimono echoed another widespread myth about things Japanese—that they harbor an unimaginable mystery under their attractive and opaque surface. The kimono, from this perspective, intimated to its Parisian wearers that their japoniste imaginations housed under the garment may include fantasies of which even the wearers themselves had not been aware. Accommodating Parisian bourgeoises’ bodies in its unspeakable, elusive, and ambiguous—adjectives that gently invite the term “queer” as a synonym—inside, the kimono promised these women possibilities to reimagine their bodies and desires outside the norms of their home culture.

Bio
Marcella Simoni is Associate Professor of History and Institutions of Asia at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. She holds a Ph.D from the University of London (UCL, 2004) and has been a Research Fellow at Brown University (1995; 1997), at the American Jewish University in Los Angeles (2001), at the Centre de Recherche Francais à Jerusalem (2009), at INALCO, Paris (2010) and in the same year she received the Alessandro Vaciago Prize for Social and Political Science from the Accademia dei Lincei. At Ca’ Foscari, Marcella Simoni teaches “History of Israel and Palestine” and “History of the Jews in Asia”. Marcella Simoni is also affiliated with NYU Florence where she teaches “Jews in 20th Century Europe”. Marcella Simoni has published two books on health and welfare during the British Mandate in Palestine (A Healthy Nation and At the margins of conflict, Cafoscarina 2010), has edited various volumes on and has written extensively on peer reviewed Italian and international historical journals. She is a founding and a board member of the journal Quest. Issues in Contemporary Jewish History and a board member of the Journal of Modern Jewish Studies. Her research interests include Jews in Asia, civil society in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the history of medicine and public health, a focus on history, memory and trauma, cinema in the Middle East.

Abstract
The modern history of the Jews in South, East and Southeast Asia is a broad and extended field, both in chronological and geographical terms. Overall, scholarship has investigated Jewish history in these very broad areas as a series of distinct and successive phenomena. Always quoted are the history of the Sassoon and other families originally from Baghdad and their role in trade along the routes of the British Empire; that of German and Austrian Jews as refugees in Shanghai during the Second World War; or, for another example that comes from the same period, the history of Japanese consul in Kaunas Chiune Sugihara, issuing visas for transit through Japan for Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe. A transnational perspective provides greater tools to draw a comprehensive and interconnected picture of the Jewish experience in South, East and Southeast Asia. The press is one of them: in this paper I look at the Jewish press of India, Singapore, Shanghai and Harbin at different times between the end of the 19th century and 1945. An analysis of the languages, circulation and contents of this material allows us to understand the transnational and interconnected dimension of the Jewish experience in these areas, its diversity and the differences and similarities between the various communities, as well as their connection to the ideas and ideologies that were re-shaping the Jewish global experience in the 20th century. Among them, the encounter between different groups of Jews (Ashkenazi, Indian and Baghdadi Jews, for instance), the acceptance or resistance towards reformed Judaism or Zionism. The main primary sources for this study are the periodical publications of the Jewish communities of India, Singapore and China between the end of the 19th century and the mid-1940s.

Bio
Toral Jatin Gajarawala was trained in comparative literature at UC Berkeley, with a focus on Anglophone, Francophone and Hindi literatures. Her teaching and research examine the ways in which culture is shaped by the lived realities of postcoloniality.  She is the author of Untouchable Fictions: Literary Realism and the Crisis of Caste (Fordham, 2013).  More recently, she has written about the phenomenon of ‘passing’ in precarious times, the Youtube channel Dalit Camera, postcolonial libraries, and the graphic novel Munnu: A Boy from Kashmir.  Her current project, Ajnabi: an Existential Reckoning in South Asia, considers the afterlife of postcolonial existentialisms in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, and the work of artists, playwrights, and poets in conceptualizing another discourse of freedom.

Abstract
This paper asks how we might understand the series of paintings done in 1963 by the Indian artist K.H. Ara, “The Black Nudes.”  Typically attributed to the interest that Indian modernist artists had in Paul Cézanne and other European impressionists, as well as a history of European influence on postcolonial artists in terms of genre and style (Ara’s other primary mode was the still life), both black and nude suggest a range of other conceptual frames.  Ara’s nudes were not African but Indian and Ara himself was Muslim and Dalit.  Touching upon the black of the color line and decolonization and the black of caste, as well as Paul Cezanne’s Afternoon in Naples with a Black Servant, and Ara’s asianate figure from the painter Roberto Melli’s collection, this paper will thus move through a series of interpretive frames typically used to understand “black,” “nude,” “Indian,” and “European.”  I will conclude by considering how we might understand intellectual and aesthetic proximity (touch) in terms of the conference’s Asia/Mediterranean exploration.

Keynote Address 1

Bio
Nicola Di Cosmo is the Henry Luce Foundation Professor of East Asian Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton, USA).  His research interests are in the history of Chinese and Inner Asian frontiers from the ancient to the modern periods, history of nomadic peoples, and history of the Qing dynasty. Recent publications focus on the use of paleoclimatic data in historical research.  His latest book, authored with Lorenzo Pubblici, is Venezia e i Mongoli: commercio e diplomazia sulle vie della seta nel medioevo. (2022)

Abstract
In the aftermath of the catastrophe that befell the Venetian and Genoese residents in Tana in1343, the two Mediterranean Republics shifted their stance from mutual rivalry and competition to cooperation in order to resist the Mongol onslaught and retain their Black Sea positions.  Such political and commercial cooperation, while mutually advantageous, failed after a few years, when the Republics made separate peace agreements with the Mongols, and resumed their conflict with even greater animus.  This paper explores why this rare but prolonged experiment in cooperation failed, increasing the vulnerability of the Italian merchants at a time of growing uncertainty and progressive closure of the Eurasian continental trade routes.

Tuesday, 13 June 2023

Panel 3: Traveling People, Tastes, and Sound

Bio
Hyoungee Kong is an Assistant Professor Faculty Fellow of Art History at NYU Shanghai. She received her PhD in Art History from the Pennsylvania State University. Her work focuses broadly on queer subjectivities that formed through cross-cultural consumption between East Asia and the West. Her primary research and teaching areas include visual and material cultures of France and Japan in the nineteenth–twentieth centuries; gender and sexuality studies; queer theory; and history of photography in East Asia. Kong’s current book project, Fleshly Japonisme, examines queer potentials of japonisme, or the Western taste for Japan, that catered to middle-class women in Belle Epoque France. Through intermedial analyses of advertisements, paintings, postcards, garments, and literature, the book explores the ways that ideas of Japan helped these women reimagine their bodily pleasures and desires beyond Western bourgeois conventions of femininity.

Bio
Miriam Castorina is a Research Fellow at the University of Florence. She is the author of Le donne occidentali nei diari dei viaggiatori cinesi dell’Ottocento [Western Women in 19th century Chinese travel accounts] (Nuove Edizioni Romane 2008), and In the garden of the world. Italy to a young 19th-century Chinese traveler (FUP 2020). She is a member of the Editorial Board of the journal Sulla via del Catai. Miriam is interested in Chinese travel literature, cultural contacts and mobilities between China and Italy, and the history of Chinese language education in Italy. Her current research focuses on travel narratives from China to Italy, particularly in the 20th century.

Abstract
As new technologies and global perspectives have given rise to new forms of travel and mobility in the 21st century, the emerging paradigm of New Mobility Studies (Sheller and Urry 2006) has encouraged interdisciplinary discussions about human movements and the resulting cultural exchange and transmission. Taking into account travelling as a fundamental activity of cultural construction, this critical perspective allows the conjugation of mobility studies with humanities (Merriman, and Pearce 2017), and cultural mobility (Greenblatt 2010; Jöns, Meusburger, and Heffernan 2017), applicable both to the past and the present and able offer a new perspective on cultural interactions.

The appearance of Chinese Travel writing about Italy can be traced back to the eighteenth century, when Italy emerged as a chosen travel destination among the Chinese, for two main reasons. Firstly, the Roman Catholic church’s interest in evangelizing China, which attracted underprivileged young Chinese converts to Italy as early as the 18th century. Secondly, about a century later, Italy’s artistic heritage started becoming known to Chinese cultural elites, often through the European literature on the Grand Tour, thus propelling a flow of cultured (and sufficiently wealthy) Chinese travelers.

This paper reconstructs the history of Chinese cultural travels to Italy over the centuries, through the individual stories of some of its lesser-known protagonists. Furthermore, it emphasizes the convergences and divergences in the narratives produced by Chinese travelers in Italy, with a specific focus on how the development of new mobility infrastructures at the turn of the 20th century influenced them.

Bio
Gaoheng Zhang is Associate Professor of Italian Studies at the University of British Columbia. His first book, Migration and the Media: Debating Chinese Migration to Italy, 1992-2012 (University of Toronto Press), is the first detailed media and cultural study of the Chinese migration from both Italian and Chinese migrant perspectives. A second book is tentatively titled “Chinese Recipes, Italian Designs, American Resonances: Food and Fashion Cultures Through Migration and Tourism, 1980s-2010s.” It examines cultural representations and dynamics pertaining to food and fashion mobilities between China and Italy that migration and tourism help deepen. He is a Jean Monnet Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence during 2022-2023, where he studies media debates between Western Europe and China regarding the latter’s “Belt and Road Initiative” in certain East African countries.

Abstract
This presentation unravels the semantic complexity of “Italian cuisine” in contemporary Chinese socio-cultural narratives. I consider three sets of questions. First, what narratives about “Italian cuisine” are constructed through the advertising and menus of Italian and Italian-style restaurants in China? Why do the restaurateurs consider such narratives to be persuasive to Chinese customers? Second, I explore the Made in Italy cachet as it is applied by Italian food entrepreneurs to promoting Italian food in China. What do the Italians stand to gain from such discourses that inform their interviews and self-narratives? Finally, with reference to restaurant reviews, how do Chinese customers relay their experiences of “Italian food” on Chinese soil? Through addressing these questions, I uncover the larger food-associated cultural dynamics and politics related to China, Italy, and, not surprisingly, the United States.

Bio
Duane Corpis is an Associate Professor of History, NYU Shanghai; Global Network Associate Professor, NYU. Prior to joining NYU Shanghai, he was an Assistant Professor at Cornell University. He holds a PhD from New York University.Professor Corpis is recipient of the 2013-2014 Smith Book Award from the Southern Historical Association and the 2013 Hans Rosenberg Article Prize from the Central European History Society. He has been an NEH Humanities Summer Scholar, a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Central European University, and a Herzog Ernst Fellow at the Gotha Research Center and Library. He also serves on the Editorial Collective of the journal Radical History Review.

Abstract
German travel literature of the eighteenth century was a well-developed genre, in part because of the central role German writers played in developing the European geographic imaginaries already in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.  This paper will explore continuities and differences in the ways that German authors discussed the soundscapes that they found notable in foreign lands.  As part of a larger project that examines how German communities understood the sensorial apprehension and cultural meaning of noise before the advent of machine-based industrialization, I explore why certain sounds, especially natural soundscapes, were more intensely “heard” in overseas lands within discourses of foreign landscapes in distinction to German territories, while soundscapes in foreign cities, were often articulated in ways more familiar.  This nature versus urban distinction marks a tendency in eighteenth-century discourse to view foreign landscapes (and soundscapes) as divided between an essentialized natural order versus a (sometimes shared) civilizational frame centered on the human city.

Bio
Masha Kirasirova is Assistant Professor of History at New York University. She is the author of The Eastern International: Arabs, Central Asians, and Jews in the Soviet Union’s Anticolonial Empire, forthcoming with Oxford University Press in 2023, and an editor of Russian-Arab Worlds: A Documentary History (Oxford, 2023) and of The Routledge Handbook of the Global Sixties Between Protest and Nation-Building (2018).

Abstract
This paper will consider the connections between Soviet Central Asia and the Eastern Mediterranean through the career of the Uzbek politician Nuriddin Mukhitdinov (1917-2008). Mukhitdinov rose up the party hierarchy to become in 1957 a full member in the Moscow Politburo, the highest policy-making authority within the Soviet Union, and was later appointed the Ambassador to Syria (1968-1977). His skillful navigation of the nexus of Soviet domestic affirmative action and international ambitions allowed him to achieve a level of power unattainable for any other marginalized ‘minority’ representing a Cold War superpower, including any Muslim from China or any African American cultural or political ambassador from the United States. His role within and outside the Soviet Union was to engage the emerging decolonizing world, to use Soviet Central Asian culture to correct perceptions of Russian dominance within the Soviet Union, and to challenge Cold War-era notions that colonialism persisted in the form of socialism.

Panel 4: Safavids and Ottomans between Europe and Asia

Bio
Marcella Simoni is Associate Professor of History and Institutions of Asia at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. She holds a Ph.D from the University of London (UCL, 2004) and has been a research fellow at Brown University (1995; 1997), at the American Jewish University in Los Angeles (2001), at the Centre de Recherche Francais à Jerusalem (2009), at INALCO, Paris (2010) and in the same year she received the Alessandro Vaciago Prize for Social and Political Science from the Accademia dei Lincei. At Ca’ Foscari, Marcella Simoni teaches “History of Israel and Palestine” and “History of the Jews in Asia”. Marcella Simoni is also affiliated with NYU Florence where she teaches “Jews in 20th Century Europe”. Marcella Simoni has published two books on health and welfare during the British Mandate in Palestine (A Healthy Nation and At the margins of conflict, Cafoscarina 2010), has edited various volumes on and has written extensively on peer reviewed Italian and international historical journals. She is a founding and a board member of the journal Quest. Issues in Contemporary Jewish History and a board member of the Journal of Modern Jewish Studies. Her research interests include Jews in Asia, civil society in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the history of medicine and public health, a focus on history, memory and trauma, cinema in the Middle East.

Bio
Mahnaz Yousefzadeh is Professor of Global Liberal Studies (NYU), Affiliate Professor of Italian (NYU) and Affiliate Professor of Art History at NYU Abu Dhabi. She is the author of City and Nation in Italian Unification (Palgrave Macmillan 2011), Florence’s Embassy to the Sultan of Egypt (Palgrave, 2019), scholarly articles on the relation of aesthetics and politics in European nation-building, as well as numerous studies on early modern relations between Europe and the Persico-Islamic worlds.  Her current projects – one academic and the other a creative non-fiction – trace the encounters between traditions through the movement of people, artefacts, and images. Her scholarly book project is on Florence’s relation to the Persianate world in the early modern period. Mahnaz’s creative nonfiction is similarly concerned with recovering ethical voices and meanings by revisiting as translator, mediator, and the traveller, the experience of her migration from and return to Iran after decades of living in the west.

Abstract
This paper will present the privileged relation between Safavid Shah ʽAbbas I of Persia and Ferdinand de’ Medici Grand Duke of Tuscany, two sovereigns who came to power simultaneously in the years that saw the waning of Portuguese domination in the Persian Gulf. The study brings together methods and material from diverse perspectives and disciplines to situate Ferdinand’s Persian project in a history of global early modernity.

Bio
Larry Wolff is the Julius Silver Professor of History at New York University,  and co-director of NYU Florence at Villa La Pietra.   His newest book is The Shadow of the Empress:  Fairy-Tale Opera and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy (2023).  He is also the author of Woodrow Wilson and the Reimagining of Eastern Europe (2020) and Disunion within the Union: The Uniate Church and the Partitions of Poland (2019), The Singing Turk: Ottoman Power and Operatic Emotions on the European Stage from the Siege of Vienna to  the Age of Napoleon (2016), Paolina’s Innocence: Child Abuse in Casanova’s Venice (2012), The Idea of Galicia:  History and Fantasy in Habsburg Political Culture (2010),  Venice and the Slavs:  The Discovery of Dalmatia in the Age of Enlightenment (2001),  Inventing Eastern Europe:  The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (1994), The Vatican and Poland in the Age of the Partitions (1988), and Postcards from the End of the World:  Child Abuse in Freud’s Vienna (1988).   He writes frequently about opera, publishing essays and reviews in the Times Literary Supplement, the New York Review of Books, the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and the Hudson Review.  He has received Fulbright, American Council of Learned Societies, and Guggenheim fellowships, and he is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Abstract
This paper will consider the phenomenon of the singing Turk, especially in the operas of Rossini, and the ways that Turks and Italians encounter one another on and across the Mediterranean in operatic scenarios and music.  The paper will touch on the clashing and reconciliation of cultures through musical performance, and offer some reflections on contemporary issues of immigration on the Mediterranean as seen through the prism of nineteenth-century opera.

Bio
I am a specialist in Middle Eastern history with a focus on early modern Ottoman and Safavid Empires. The questions surrounding the Sunni-Shi‘a conflict during the early modern period and its enmeshment with issues of political, religious, and fiscal legitimacy in inter-confessional and inter-imperial contact zones is at the core of my research interests. By examining the religiosities of early modern Ottoman Anatolia, Kurdistan, and Safavid Iran, my research provides an accurate picture for a deeper understanding of both the religious transformation of the Ottoman and Safavid polities in the early modern era and the current geo-political and demographic make-up in the region today.

Abstract
The early modern Ottoman state implemented the policy of forced population transfers, sürgün, effectively as a strategy to either populate and/or Islamicize newly conquered territories or to deal with the “disobedient” subjects of the empire. With origins dating as early as the mid-fourteenth century, the policy of forced settlement continued in the following century as the empire expanded into broader territories, particularly in Europe where the local populations were majority Christian. This approach to defining and governing subjecthood in the early modern Ottoman empire did not differ much when the subjects in question were deemed “heretic,” “unruly,” or “disobedient.” As opposed to conventional wisdom, however, the Ottoman Qizilbash were not subjected to the policy of sürgün frequently until the conquest of Cyprus in 1570. This paper discusses why Cyprus played a central role in Ottoman state’s dealings with heresy in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

Panel 5: Contemporary Eurasian Connections

Bio
Philippe Le Corre is a Senior Fellow with the Asia Society Policy Institute (Center for China Analysis) and a Research Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. He is also a Visiting Professor and Senior Research Fellow at ESSEC Business School in Paris, and Associate Fellow with FRS. He specializes in Europe-China relations, Chinese investments in Europe and Chinese influence in Southern Europe. Philippe previously worked at two of Washington’s foreign policy think-tanks: The Brookings Institution and The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He was also Special Adviser to the French Defense Minister and a Senior analyst with the MOD Policy Planning Directorate. Philippe is the author or co-author of six books, including China’s Offensive in Europe: Brookings Institution Press, 2016. He testified several times before the US Congress, the French Senate and the French National Assembly. He is the author of various monographs and book chapters published by Carnegie and Brookings, and contributed to several edited volumes including The China Questions 2 (ed: M. A. Carrai, J. Rudolph, M. Szonyi): Harvard Press, 2022; and Europe in an Era of growing Sino-American Competition (ed: S. Biba, Reinhard Wolf): Routledge, 2021

Bio
Davide Lombardo is Lecturer in History, Metropolitan Studies and Liberal Studies at NYU Florence and also teaches Political Science at Kent State University Florence. He holds a doctorate in History and Civilization from the European University Institute (Fiesole, Italy) as well as a French (Grenoble II) and Italian (Pisa) degrees in Modern History. His research focuses on European History from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. In 2009, he was Visiting Research Fellow at the Lewis Walpole Library at Yale University, Visiting Fellow at the Yale Center for British Art, and Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at the Huntington Library. In 2020 and 2021 he was Visiting Assistant Professor Faculty Fellow of Liberal Studies at NYU Shanghai. His latest work is an edited volume – with Marcella Simoni, Languages of Racism and Discrimination in Twentieth-Century Italy, Palgrave 2022

Abstract
2022 marked the 60th anniversary of the “accidental death” of Enrico Mattei, the manager that, with his unconventional industrial strategy, lead Italian state-owned energy company ENI to become a relevant global actor and something more than a competitor for the energy cartel that had dominated the  international scene since the 1920s.  A most welcome partner by Mediterranean and Asian countries, such as Egypt, Persia, Tunisia found in ENI not only better deals but a partnership for the industrial development of their country. At home, arguably, more than anyone else, Mattei fostered and created the conditions for the 1950s Italian economic boom. This paper explores the various dimensions of the history of Italian “Petrolio” [oil] and gas between growing energy needs, competition for natural resources and international tension. In her inaugural speech in fall 2022,  the new Italian cabinet’s Prime Minister evoked the need for a “Mattei’s plan”:  this was more than paying lip service in the wake of the anniversary of Mattei’s, rather it marked the attempt to appropriate and repropose a set of national aspirations – in part remote from the political roots of Meloni – for a renewed strategic agenda as geopolitics is shifting away from globalization and into a renewed phase of not-so-cold-war.

Bio
Stephen G. Gross is jointly appointed in the Department of History and the Center for European and Mediterranean Studies at NYU. After working as an economist at the Bureau of Economic Analysis in Washington DC, he completed his PhD at UC Berkeley where he subsequently lectured with the International and Area Studies Program. In his research and teaching Dr. Gross is interested in 20th century Germany, European unification, European and international political economy, energy policy, and international relations. His forthcoming book—Energy and Power: Germany in the Age of Oil, Atoms, and Climate Change (Oxford)—explores the political economy of energy crises and transition in the Federal Republic of Germany after 1945. His first book, Export Empire, was published by Cambridge University Press in December 2015. He has also published on a variety of economic themes in German and European history in Central European History, Contemporary European History, German Politics and Society, and Eastern European Politics and Society, as well as in various book chapters.

Abstract
This paper traces the deepening of natural gas infrastructural ties between the European Union (EU), Russia, and the Mediterranean and Black Sea regions from the 1990s to the 2010s. It asks how the EU’s conception of energy security changed from the collapse of Communism through Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, and how energy security contradicted or complemented other European energy goals such as liberalization and environmental protection. It begins with the European Energy Charter of 1991, which aimed to integrate the post-communist states of Eastern Europe and Russia into a new legal framework that would expand investment into transnational infrastructure and facilitate the flow of hydrocarbons into the EU. It illustrates how, in the rush to tap major natural gas fields outside of Europe, questions of energy security lost priority for policymakers in Brussels, as their belief that depoliticized, competitive, liberal, and short-term energy markets could solve nearly any challenge gained momentum. This paper then shows how gas infrastructure became re-politicized during an era of pipeline competition in the early 2000s, as new rival pipeline projects proliferated—including Nord Stream, Southstream, Nabucco, and the Trans-Adriatic Pipeline—pitting different constellations of countries and corporations against one another. After 2010 questions of energy security resurfaced in dramatic fashion, culminating in Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine in 2014. But this created intense divisions within the EU and generated intractable political problems by creating an apparent trilemma that pitted the priority of security against the goals growth and environmental protection.

Bio
Maria Adele Carrai is an Assistant Professor of Global China Studies at NYU Shanghai. Her research explores the history of international law in East Asia and investigates how China’s rise as a global power shapes norms and redefines the international distribution of power. She co-leads the Research Initiative ‘Mapping Global China,’ and is the author of Sovereignty in China. A Geneology of a Concept since 1840 (CUP 2019) and co-editor of The China Questions 2 – Critical Insights into US-China Relations (HUP 2022). Before joining NYU Shanghai, she was a recipient of a three-year Marie-Curie fellowship at KU Leuven. She was also a Fellow at the Italian Academy of Columbia University, Princeton-Harvard China and the World Program, Max Weber Program of the European University Institute of Florence, and New York University Law School.

Abstract
The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) was launched in 2013 by Xi Jinping. Europe and its vast market were the end point of the maritime silk road and economic belt. What was the connectivity strategy beyond the BRI, and what role the Mediterranean played in it? What is the status of the BRI in the Mediterranean? The paper looks at China’s connectivity strategy in the Mediterranean. It focuses on the key policy documents and the actual economic statecraft that China is promoting in the Mediterranean region.

Bio
Yifei Li is Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at NYU Shanghai and Global Network Assistant Professor at NYU. His research concerns both the macro-level implications of Chinese environmental governance for state-society relations, marginalized populations, and global ecological sustainability, and the micro-level bureaucratic processes of China’s state interventions in the environmental realm. He has received research support from the United States National Science Foundation, the Henry Luce Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the University of Chicago Center in Beijing, and the China Times Cultural Foundation, among other extramural sources. He is the lead author (with Judith Shapiro) of China Goes Green: Coercive Environmentalism for a Troubled Planet. His recent work appears in Current Sociology, Sociology of Development, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Environmental Sociology, Journal of Environmental Management, Journal of Food Law & Policy, and other scholarly outlets. His research has been featured on NPR, in The Economist, Foreign Affairs, and other media. He received his Master’s and Ph.D. degrees in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Bachelor’s from Fudan University.

Abstract
Much of the critical literature in development studies examines “hard” developmental undertakings such as infrastructure, mining, industrial restructuring, and energy. Less critical attention has been paid to “soft” projects such as mass tourism, scientific collaboration, and cultural exchange. This article seeks to issue a corrective by examining the influx of Chinese state capital into such “soft” initiatives in Eurasia and beyond. Despite the common narrative of these projects being “neutral” and “win-win,” BRI-funded tourism and archeology exhibit the tendency to impose a China-centric, tianxia-like framework on Eurasian history and culture. These projects have engaged in not only discursive recalibration of historiography and archeology but also the spatial and material transformation of landscapes in accordance with BRI-imposed imaginaries. While COVID-19 has placed a hold on most of such initiatives, the pandemic has also left many of China’s BRI partner countries even more dependent on BRI-enabled growth and development. The softer face of the Belt and Road can turn out to be as consequential as its harder side.

Keynote Address 2

Bio
Joanna Waley-Cohen is the Provost for NYU Shanghai and Julius Silver Professor of History at New York University, where she has taught Chinese history since 1992. As Provost, she serves as NYU Shanghai’s chief academic officer, setting the university’s academic strategy and priorities, and overseeing academic appointments, research, and faculty affairs. Her research interests include early modern Chinese history, China and the West, and Chinese imperial culture, especially in the Qianlong era. She has received many honors, including archival and postdoctoral fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, Goddard and Presidential Fellowships from NYU, and an Olin Fellowship in Military and Strategic History from Yale.

Waley-Cohen’s books include The Culture of War in China: Empire and the Military under the Qing Dynasty (I.B. Tauris, 2006), The Sextants of Beijing: Global Currents in Chinese History (W.W. Norton, 1999), and Exile in Mid-Qing China: Banishment to Xinjiang, 1758-1820 (Yale University Press, 1991).  Her current scholarly projects include a revised history of imperialism in China, a study of daily life in China c.1800, and a history of culinary culture in early modern China.

Abstract
Porcelain is sometimes said to have changed China in many ways: by improving the quality of life; by catalyzing industrial progress; by promoting international trade; by generating prosperity; and by making China famous around the world. What was Chinese porcelain’s impact in Renaissance Italy, as it began to find its way into collections and from there into paintings such as Mantegna’s famous Adoration of the Magi?

Keynote Address 1

Revisiting the Veneto-Genoese Embargo against the Golden Horde: A Prisoner’s Dilemma?

Date & Time: 4:30–6:00PM | 12 June 2023
Venue: NYU Florence, Villa La Pietra (Via Bolognese 120, Florence)

Speaker:
Nicola Di Cosmo
Henry Luce Foundation Professor of East Asian Studies
Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton

In the aftermath of the catastrophe that befell the Venetian and Genoese residents in Tana in1343, the two Mediterranean Republics shifted their stance from mutual rivalry and competition to cooperation in order to resist the Mongol onslaught and retain their Black Sea positions.  Such political and commercial cooperation, while mutually advantageous, failed after a few years, when the Republics made separate peace agreements with the Mongols, and resumed their conflict with even greater animus.  This paper explores why this rare but prolonged experiment in cooperation failed, increasing the vulnerability of the Italian merchants at a time of growing uncertainty and progressive closure of the Eurasian continental trade routes.

Keynote Address 2

Sharing Beauty: China in Italy in Premodern Times

Date & Time: 6:00–7:30PM | 13 June 2023
Venue: NYU Florence, Villa La Pietra (Via Bolognese 120, Florence)

Speaker:
Joanna Waley-Cohen
Julius Silver Professor of History at New York University
Provost of NYU Shanghai

Porcelain is sometimes said to have changed China in many ways: by improving the quality of life; by catalyzing industrial progress; by promoting international trade; by generating prosperity; and by making China famous around the world. What was Chinese porcelain’s impact in Renaissance Italy, as it began to find its way into collections and from there into paintings such as Mantegna’s famous Adoration of the Magi?

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