Dr. Paula R. Curtis

Another interesting question raised by these talks is periodization, of course! What is the watershed year? 1492? 1258? Is there one? What's great about these papers is that "individual dates become ephemera."

@letfancyroam is interested in an absence of theology (hesitant to use the word "religion") in some of the discussions. Thinking about acts of genealogy in these exchanges of tradition.

Fromherz brings up a question of how we view cosmopolitanism-- we typically associate it with empires and imperial projects, and yet the Gulf culture rejects that.

Betsy Sears () brings up the issue of how we are constantly searching for "origins" in our narratives (transformation of architecture, influence of exchange, etc.). How did viewers reckon with history (and their knowledge of it) when experiencing with/engaging these buildings?

Thinking on how to "put the Mediterranean in the rear view mirror" and disengage from the dominance of models based on its frameworks and monotheisms, @Craig_A_Perry urges us to also consider that there's a flattening of even those practices/histories in our discussions.

brings up that part of the work of "de-centering" is to also value social and cultural history, history from below.

Sullivan brings up that there's also a pull of ethnography that affects how certain topics get studied, especially related to places and their practices, like Africa.

Related to this, Lieber highlights that we're bringing to our studies of the globalized medieval our contemporary practices. So how do we grapple with this?

Respess notes that these practices, especially in anthropology, is inflected in our practices; the urge to "transport oneself back in time" to "experience" those "primitive" cultures-- cultural anthropology does not always have a coherent sense of temporality.

Leitzel adds that "de-centering" the global middle ages can also do the work of looking at non-elite as participants in the globalization process itself.

@cerydel notes that in literary studies getting away from the divisions of nationalism is very hard, especially because departmental distinctions reinforce these notions. She suggests that colleagues in social sciences could help contribute practices to help break that down.

She's given a lot of historical context materials for her students in literature to help with analytical thinking and it's caused a huge shift in their abilities.

Christian de Pee brings up how many of the papers dealt with "crossroads" or "peripheries" and asks why CAN'T these places be a center? What defines a center? They're made centers by writing, power, religious power, but one can also see "centers" as hinterlands.

He brings up that in local experience, these locations or practices are ALWAYS centers. It may be better to think of nodes as centers, and their density changes depends on what we're focusing on.

(networks! my research, y'all )

Sullivan brings up that in her education, classes always identified as West European/Medieval or Byzantine, and their maps centered on the Holy Roman Empire or Constantinople accordingly- by reconsidering this way of envisioning the map allowed more thoughtful questions emerge.

Michael McCarty says what we're always doing as historians is examining things that are three-dimensional, but we necessarily have to look at cross-sections that are two-dimensional. One issue in world history is we're only ever looking at the people who are moving!

What happens to the people who get left behind? What are local understandings happening there?

Yes!https://twitter.com/cerydel/status/1093914282109136901 …

Fromherz: we need to ask what we MEAN by "medieval" when we say it-- there was already a de-centering going on in relation to earlier models/empires/etc. Aspirations to re-center are part of de-centering!