Across the Corrupting Sea

Across the Corrupting Sea: Post-Braudelian Approaches to the Ancient Eastern Mediterranean reframes current discussions of the Mediterranean world by rereading the past with new methodological approaches. The work asks readers to consider how future studies might write histories of the Mediterranean, moving from the larger pan-Mediterranean approaches of The Corrupting Sea towards locally-oriented case studies. Spanning from the Archaic period to the early Middle Ages, contributors engage the pioneering studies of the Mediterranean by Fernand Braudel through the use of critical theory, GIS network analysis, and postcolonial cultural inquiries. Scholars from several time periods and disciplines rethink the Mediterranean as a geographic and cultural space shaped by human connectivity and follow the flow of ideas, ships, trade goods and pilgrims along the roads and seascapes that connected the Mediterranean across time and space. The volume thus interrogates key concepts like cabotage, seascapes, deep time, social networks, and connectivity in the light of contemporary archaeological and theoretical advances in order to create new ways of writing more diverse histories of the ancient world that bring together local contexts, literary materials, and archaeological analysis.

Cavan Concannon is an Assistant Professor of Religion in the School of Religion at the University of Southern California. He previously held an ACLS Fellowship in the Department of Religion at Duke University and a postdoctoral fellowship at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, and participated in excavations at Ostia and Corinth. Cavan completed his PhD in New Testament and Early Christianity at Harvard University. His research takes a trans-disciplinary approach to early Christianity, integrating philology, philosophy, critical theory, and material culture to explore questions of connectivity, identity, and the creation of communities across time and space. His first book, 'When You Were Gentiles': Specters of Ethnicity in Roman Corinth and Paul's Corinthian Correspondence, was published in 2014. Other work has appeared in the Harvard Theological Review, The Journal of Biblical Literature, and several edited volumes. His future research explores the correspondence of Dionysus of Corinth as a lens into the development of early Christian communities. Lindsey A. Mazurek is a PhD candidate and J.B. Duke Fellow at Duke University in the Department of Art, Art History & Visual Studies. Her dissertation, 'Globalizing the Sculptural Landscape of the Isis and Sarapis Cults in Hellenistic and Roman Greece', examines the ways that devotee communities used sculptures to explore cultural and religious questions in Egyptian sanctuaries. She holds an MA from Duke in Art History and a BA in Classical Languages from the University of California at Berkeley. Her research focuses on cross-cultural connectivity and ancient imperialism, particularly on the ways that local communities understood and interpreted their relationships with disparate cultures across the Mediterranean. She has excavated at Mycenae and the Athenian Agora. She has presented her research across Europe and the United States, and has published in the Journal of Roman Archaeology.