“Our Connected Past:  Mobility, Borderlands and Global Connections in the Pre-Modern World”

Recent scholarship has sought to break down the old conception of the pre-modern world as being fixed and static by comparison to the global mobility and dynamism of the modern world. This lecture series seeks to illustrate some of the complex and mobile interconnections between the people of the pre-modern world. As Richard Bulliet and others have argues, communities on the “edge” of a group play a critical role in cultural change at the core. Accordingly, the talks in this series will address connections within border regions, connections that cross borders, local connections that contribute to global changes and global connections that contribute to local changes. The cross-border and intra-borderland mobility that comprised and allowed these global connections played a dynamic role in the present of the pre-modern world and in shaping the past of our self-consciously global world.

October 13, 2018 – Colleen Ho – “The Greatest Hits of Mongol History: Life, Death, and Chinggis Khan” and “The Unintended Legacy of the Middle Ages: White Supremacism’s Obsession with Medieval History”

November 9, 2018 – Taco Terpstra – “Trade in the Ancient Mediterranean: Private Order and Public Institutions”