Recent years have seen a plethora of publications on Jewish-Christian-Muslim relations, many of which fall into the framework of “Mediterranean Studies”. A lot of this research, however, has come short in concretely analysing and conceptualising how members of different religious groups (including those that stand or are perceived to stand in-between these groups, keyword “hybridity”) have communicated with each other directly and

- in different situations or concrete settings, such as when trading or dealing with diplomatic matters
- under different socio-political and socio-economic circumstances
- on a variety of topics, such as law, religion, science, or civic matters
- within and across different categories of belonging, such as gender, identity, religion or race
- orally, symbolically, in writing, as well as by means of material exchange
- in different languages and linguistic variations, including sociolinguistic registers
- and with different assumptions and, indeed, different outcomes

Against this backdrop, the conference aims to fundamentally engage with theories and frameworks of communication, as well as with the extant documentation and concrete instances of communication between Jews, Christians, and Muslims in and around the Mediterranean between the seventh to sixteenth centuries. In so doing, we hope to move the discussion away from a focus on “relations” to more concrete cases of direct communication.

The conference will feature invited papers from established experts in the field as well as discussion sessions in which we aim to approach the topic of ‘communication’ on an overarching, more abstract level. With this Call for Papers, we hope to address scholars who are either PhD candidates or postdoctoral researchers working on topics that fall into our areas of interest. We are keen to hear from you!

We particularly welcome papers that fit into our four main themes:

- Legal frameworks and interaction
- Science, philosophy and materiality
- Violence, war and diplomacy
- Trading networks and commerce

This conference is organised by the research group RELCOM (“Religious Communication in and between the Arabic-Islamic and Latin-Christian Sphere”) and it is generously funded by the AHRC and the DFG. We will be able to invite candidates travelling from within the UK and Europe. Applicants from other locations are also welcome to apply but funding can then only be partial.

Please send an abstract of a maximum of 500 words together with a provisional title and a short CV to: kate.f.tinson@durham.ac.uk and alejandro.pelaez-martin@uni-konstanz.de by 30th of November.

Organisers, the RELCOM team: Theresa Jäckh, Daniel G. König, Alejandro Peláez Martín and Kate Tinson

Venue: St Chad's College, Durham University, 18 North Bailey, Durham DH1 3RH, United Kingdom