My research vitally depends on collaborative and digital methodologies. Some of the collaborative projects I have directed or co-directed over the years include:
◘ Roots and Routes: Digital Scholarship and the Premodern Mediterranean. This 3-year series of Connaught Summer Institutes at the University of Toronto provided a venue for cross-disciplinary interactions among advanced graduate students and faculty broadly interested in questions of knowledge production and the digital methodologies that allow us to explore them from new angles. The series concluded in June 2014.
◘ Serai, an online collaboratory for the study of premodern encounters (ca. 2013-2017);
◘ A workshop on Networks of Interaction in the Early Modern Mediterranean (Toronto, Oct. 12-13, 2007);
◘ An international workshop on Language and Cultural Mediation in the Mediterranean, 1200-1800 (co-organized with Eric Dursteler), part of the 10th session of the Mediterranean Research Meeting at the European University Institute (Montecatini Terme, Italy, March 2009);
◘ A special issue of Radical History Review, co-edited with A. Zimmerman, on the Politics of Boycotts (2019), which explored how the campaign for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) in support of the Palestinian struggle to end Israeli occupation, discrimination, and dispossession is part of a long transnational history of boycotts as strategies of refusal;
◘ In addition, for the past decade I have worked closely with a team of digital librarians at UTSC’s Digital Scholarship Unit and doctoral student RAs on The Dragoman Renaissance Research Platform. This Open Access, curated digital project aims to facilitate research into the personal and professional trajectories and textual practices of over 100 dragomans (diplomatic interpreter-translators) employed by the Venetian consulate in Istanbul, from ca. 1550 to ca. 1750. More broadly, the project seeks to shed light on the role of dragomans — an important yet surprisingly under-studied group — in mediating sociopolitical and ethnolinguistic relations between the Ottoman and Venetian empires at a crucial point in their long entangled history. In addition to making freely and openly available a range of data sets, transcriptions, and facsimiles of archival objects (from Italy, Turkey, France, Croatia, Austria, Germany, and the UK) that can be dynamically edited, analyzed, visualized, and augmented, the Dragoman Renaissance Research Platform also seeks to model collaboration and resource sharing among scholars and students from a range of disciplinary perspectives interested in processes of cultural mediation in the early modern Mediterranean. This project has been generously funded by an Early Researcher Award from the Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Please get in touch for more details.