Editor’s Introduction

Abstract

This issue includes a transcript of the 2021 panel discussion “Teaching the Mediterranean.” The panel, convened during the Annual Congress of the Mediterranean Studies Association, hosted presentations by Ann Zimo of the University of New Hampshire, Darryl Phillips of Connecticut College, and Jesús-David Jerez-Gomez of California State University, San Bernardino, and generated a lively post-presentation conversation with panelists and audience. But a single and serious message emerged out of the excitement: the greatest challenge to teaching in the field of Mediterranean studies is navigating its constant state of flux.There is no avoiding the real world for scholars in Mediterranean studies. We live with dynamic institutions that exercise unremitting pressure on teaching and research. As a result, we often find our customary intellectual practices ineffective in responding to institutional constraints. The felicitous consequence, if we can judge from the discussion in the panel transcript, is the turn to the imagination. Darryl Phillips reminds us of this resource, readily available to us in our original passion for our field of study. Who will deny that the scholarly journey begins with a sudden flash of affinity on the terrain of the imagination? We follow the transformation of that flash of the imagination into a sustained flame in the play of myth busting and the theater of games in Ann Zimo’s courses.Scholars in Mediterranean studies also contend with the fluid track of change in their own disciplines. Particularly in the humanities and the humanistic social sciences, the conventions that consign us to separate departmental silos continue to strengthen, and all the while, our fields increasingly share theoretical substance and applied knowledge. Good and bad are to be found in this development. The good is the enrichment of our disciplines. It is a good that compensates to a degree for the bad of forcing departments to compete for the claim to academic expertise instead of encouraging cooperation among disciplines. Jesús-David Jerez-Gomez captures both the elation and the distress of this disciplinary evolution in the story of his design for an interdepartmental curriculum.To sum up, the panel discussion was a welcome opportunity for MSA participants to share the highs and lows of scholarship in a dynamic field. But as time passes, and we develop a perspective on the event, it is clear that the panel was more than an ephemeral forum. The transcript captures for sustained reflection the intellectual and imaginative resources we deploy in the practice of Mediterranean studies. It is to be hoped that institutions and public attention focus on the value of those resources.Those resources are on full display in the following articles and book reviews. In the significance of the Mediterranean for the ancient Kingdom of Mari, Maria de Fátima Rosa locates a distinctive element in the mentalité of Syro-Mesopotamians in the Amorite period. Carl Davila draws up a helpful état présent of scholarship on music and dance in the Mediterranean Middle Ages, yet another signpost in the study of attitudes that construct the guide rails of cultures in the region of the Great Sea. Agata Kubala’s article on the German philhellene Eduard Schaubert highlights those guide rails. And Bavjola Shatro Gami concludes this multi-millennial survey of mentalités in the Mediterranean with her careful reading of a work by the twentieth-century author Musine Kokalari, acknowledged as the first woman writer in Albanian literature. Book reviews by Nabil Matar, Mark Choate, Selin Ipek and Ross Clare complement in both periodicity and topicality this issue’s focus on the imaginaries, the attitudes, and the making of cultures in the Mediterranean.Susan L. Rosenstreich, Dowling College