Brian Catlos investigates social, economic and cultural interaction among ethno-religious groups in the Medieval Mediterranean, especially minority-majority relations. Rigorously empirical yet drawing on a range of disciplinary methodologies, he uses particular studies to formulate broad theoretical positions regarding human experience across history. His many publications range from "To Catch a Spy" (1996) which studied a Christian bureaucrat in Egypt to The Victors and the Vanquished (2004; AHA Fagg Prize 2005) a major revisionary study of Muslims in Spain. Current projects look at the enmeshment of Jewish, Christian and Muslim elites and towards a "general theory" of ethno-religious social interaction.

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Céline Dauverd is teaching courses on the Renaissance and Mediterranean History at the University of California, Los Angeles. She has written a dissertation on the Genoese trade diaspora in Spanish Naples. She has received fellowships on Renaissance Studies and has published numerous reviews in the Annales d’Histoire Canadiennes, Sixteenth Century Journal, and the World History Journal. She has completed a book chapter on the Iberian and Genoese contributions to charities and guilds in early modern Naples in an edited volume on Social Capital in Renaissance Italy with Brepols Publisher (Spring 2007), and an article on the role of Catalans and Genoese traders in Spanish-ruled early modern Sicily appearing in the interdisciplinary journal Mediterranean Studies (Winter 2007).

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Seth Kimmel is a doctoral student in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. His dissertation examines the role of Islamic thought in the 16^th century Spanish consolidation of religious and political power both on the peninsula and in the New World. Since graduating in 2001 from Columbia University with a degree in Comparative Literature and Religion, Seth has studied and worked in New York City, Ecuador, France, Syria and Northern California. He is a member of the Seminario de Estudios Medievales, Modernos y Coloniales (Semmycolon), a Javits Fellow, and a past Rotary Cultural Ambassadorial Scholar.

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Sharon Kinoshita is Professor of Literature at UC Santa Cruz. Her Medieval Boundaries: Rethinking Difference in Old French Literature (Pennsylvania, 2006) examines literary representations of cultural contact between the Franks and the Islamic world, Byzantium, and Celtic Wales. Her new project, Paying Tribute, analyzes Francophone responses to the medieval culture of empire common to the Christian and the Muslim Mediterranean. A second project, Medieval Mediterranean Literature, reconsiders various "French," "Italian" and "Spanish" texts as witnesses of the political, cultural, and commercial exchange characterizing the late medieval Mediterranean. She has taught courses entitled "Rethinking the Mediterranean" and "Medieval Mediterranean Literature."

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Ray Kea’s early research interests focused on the 17th and 18th century Gold Coast.In the past few years his research interests have broadened to include the 17th and 18th century Atlantic world, with an emphasis on western Africa, the Danish Caribbean, and northern Europe, and ancient West Africa (pre-6th century CE). Another abiding interest has been on medieval northern Africa and Africans in medieval Europe. He has presented conference and seminar papers on this subject and has published a lengthy essay that examines West Africa from the 2nd millennium BCE to the 13th century CE. Among the unpublished papers the following can be mentioned: "The Phenomenology of al-'Umran' Towns, Commerce, and Public Texts in Christian Nubia and Muslim Kanem (6th-14th century)" (presented at the UC Medieval Seminar, The Huntington Library, May 20, 2000), "Medieval Africans and/in Europe History, Language, and the Visual Arts" (presented on the panel: "'Race' and the Return of the Middle Ages, Post 9/11," at the MLA Annual Convention, New York, December 27-30, 2002), and "The Western Sudan World-System in the Afro-Eurasian Oikumene: States, Cities, and World-Historical Change (8th-13th Centuries)," (presented at the annual UC Multi-Research Unit Conference, UC San Diego, May 7-8, 2005). The published piece is "Expansion and Contractions: World-Historical Change and the Western Sudan World-System (1200/1000 B.C.-1200/1250 A.D.)" (Journal of World-Systems Research vol.X, no, 3 (Fall 2004), pp. 723-816).

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Karla Mallette’s work focuses on the literary communications between Arabic and Romance letters in the medieval Mediterranean, with a particular focus on the Italian context. Her first book, The Kingdom of Sicily, 1100-1250: A Literary History, traced the transition from Arabic to Italianate literacy in Sicily and the emergence of an Italian literary tradition from the complexities of the Sicilian environment. She is currently at work on a study of Orientalist philologists from the nations of Mediterranean Europe who wrote about the Arab past of their own nations. She has also written on Mediterranean Studies and literary scholarship, and on Dante and Islam.

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Daniel Schroeter’s general research interest is on the history of the Jews of the Muslim world, with particular attention to Morocco. Two previous books, Merchants of Essaouira, and The Sultan’s Jew, examine transitions in Moroccan Jewish society with the expansion of Europe. His two major current projects move in two temporal directions: one focuses on modern transformations of Moroccan Jewries under colonial rule, while the other seeks to de-center the urban and national framework for understanding Maghribi Jewish culture by focusing on the origins, history, and culture of Jews living among Berbers from a long historical perspective.

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Nuria Silleras-Fernández lectures in History and Spanish Literature at the University of California Santa Cruz. She received her PhD in History at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (Spain, 2002). Her primary fields of interest are queenship and gender in Medieval and Early Modern Europe and the Mediterranean, as well as cultural, political and institutional history. She has published several articles and book chapters; and her first monograph, "Power, Piety and Patronage in Late Medieval Queenship: Maria de Luna" (Palgrave McMillan), is forthcoming in 2007.

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Oumelbanine Zhiri has been working on medieval and early modern Europe (mainly the Mediterranean), in particular in their relations with North Africa and the Middle East. She has published two books and several articles on Leo Africanus. She has recently helped organize the first international conference on this essential figure in the history of this interrelation (Paris, May 2003). She has also published a book on Rabelais. Recently, her research focuses on early Orientalism; the goal is to understand how a specialized field focused on "Oriental" people and countries came to existence in Europe.

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