̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - David Abulafia

King's Birthday Honours 2023

sc604 — Sat, 17 Jun 2023 08:44:22 +0000

Leaders in fields from economics to history are among the Cambridge academics recognised in the King's first birthday honours list.

Professor David Abulafia awarded Wolfson History Prize 2020

Anonymous — Tue, 16 Jun 2020 07:56:20 +0000

This year’s Wolfson History Prize has been awarded to David Abulafia, Emeritus Professor of Mediterranean History and Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, for his book ̽��ֱ��Boundless Sea: A Human History of the Oceans, published last autumn.

̽��ֱ��book traces the history of human movement, trade and communication around and across the world's greatest bodies of water, charting our relationship with the oceans from the time of the earliest seafaring societies to the maritime networks of today’s container ships.

̽��ֱ��award was announced on Monday night at the Wolfson Prize’s first virtual ceremony, which featured guest appearances from previous winners, including Professor Mary Beard from the ̽��ֱ��’s Faculty of Classics. ̽��ֱ��virtual winner announcement can be viewed below.

̽��ֱ��Chair of the Wolfson Prize judging panel, Professor David Cannadine, described the book as one of “deep scholarship” and said it was brilliantly written.

“ ̽��ֱ��Boundless Sea tackles a world encompassing subject: humanity’s constantly changing relationship with the seas that cover most of our planet and on which our very lives depend,” Cannadine said.

In ̽��ֱ��Boundless Sea, Abulafia follows merchants, explorers, pirates, cartographers and travellers in their quests for spices, gold, ivory, slaves, lands for settlement and knowledge of what lay beyond. It builds on Abulafia’s previous book ̽��ֱ��Great Sea, a human history of the Mediterranean.

̽��ֱ��Boundless Sea aims to go beyond “Eurocentric” approaches, examining the Atlantic waters before Columbus, and showing how lucrative trade routes were created that carried goods and ideas along the "Silk Route of the Sea" well before Europeans burst into the Indian Ocean around 1500.

“Winning the Wolfson History Prize I see as a tribute to all of us who have been trying to communicate history to the public, writing in an accessible way without jargon, and making sure that people see the past as an essential part of our human experience,” said Abulafia, a former Chair of Cambridge’s Faculty of History.

̽��ֱ��Wolfson History Prize is run and awarded by the Wolfson Foundation, an independent charity that awards grants in the fields of science, health, heritage, humanities, and the arts.

Paul Ramsbottom, chief executive at the Wolfson Foundation, said that the Prize celebrates “the importance to society of outstanding and accessible history writing”.

“David Abulafia’s book is magnificently ambitious, brilliantly examining the changing, extraordinary connections between the vast oceans and humanity,” said Ramsbottom. “While broad in chronological sweep, this clearly has a strong contemporary resonance – as our relationship with the natural world (including the oceans) is under scrutiny as never before.”

Professor David Abulafia is a maritime historian who has spent his career teaching and researching in the History Faculty at Cambridge ̽��ֱ��. He is the Papathomas Professorial Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, and a Fellow of the British Academy.

Abulafia wins for his epic history of humanity’s relationship with the world’s oceans, ̽��ֱ��Boundless Sea.

A remarkable book which through immense and impeccable research helps us to understand humanity’s relationship with the waters on which our future depends.

Wolfson History Prize judges

̽��ֱ��Holberg Prize

David Abulafia speaking at the Holberg Prize symposium.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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Cambridge in Qatar

sjr81 — Mon, 17 Mar 2014 00:01:55 +0000

̽��ֱ��exploration of the Middle East and Gulf region will range from the importance of the Indian Ocean as a medieval trade route, via European Union relations with Gulf states, to the significance of modern social media in the Arab Awakening.

Director Professor Yasir Suleiman is leading a team of 13 academics and PhD students from Cambridge and Bosnia-Herzegovina to Doha for the latest of the Centre‘s ‘Cambridge in…’ series. Sharjah, Morocco and China have all been visited in previous years.

Dr Roxane Farmanfarmaian (Department of Politics and International Studies) will examine Tunisia’s changing media and political landscape, focussing particularly on the post-revolution use of social media by young people and its impact on constitution-building, party politics, and policy construction.

̽��ֱ��notion that the ancient and early medieval Indian Ocean was effectively the ‘silk road of the sea’ will be examined by David Abulafia, drawing on both new archaeological evidence and reinterpreted classical sources such as the Periplous of the Erythraean Sea, describing the routes linking Roman Egypt to India. These channels served not only as means by which goods were traded, but also as important cultural networks, and their study is helping our understanding of the economic role of both the Gulf and the Red Sea in antiquity and the Middle Ages.

Although slave trading in the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea had a long history, and continued for many decades after abolition in Britain, there appears to be little awareness about its extent amongst Arab societies today. Despite the lack of contemporary written material, Stuart Laing (Master of Corpus Christi College) will attempt to piece together the stories of Arab slave traders and owners.
EU foreign and security policies have been sorely tested over the past decade, particularly given the shifting nature of America interests, with the result that Europe appears to have little strategic idea about what its policies towards the Gulf should be. Geoffrey Edwards will make his way through the paradoxes and nuances of Euro-Gulf relations, exploring differing models of integration and cooperation.

Professor Suleiman said: “ ̽��ֱ��symposium is a unique opportunity to establish new connections between universities in Qatar and Cambridge aiming at fostering joint research projects and academic exchanges at various levels.”

Today, as part of its ongoing initiative to enable new partnerships and foster wide-ranging exchanges of knowledge and skills internationally, scholars from Cambridge’s Centre of Islamic Studies will be co-hosting a symposium at Qatar ̽��ֱ��’s College of Arts and Sciences.

̽��ֱ��symposium is a unique opportunity to establish new connections between universities in Qatar and Cambridge.

Yasir Suleiman

Qatar ̽��ֱ��

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Academics to join British Academy Fellowship

bjb42 — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Election is an acknowledgment of "academic distinction" and is granted annually to only a small number of scholars in any field.

This year's list includes eight Cambridge academics. ̽��ֱ��newly appointed Fellows are as follows:

Professor David Abulafia has been a Professor of Mediterranean History at Cambridge since 2000 and a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College since 1974. He has a particular interest in the economic, social and political history of southern Italy in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and has written a wide variety of publications on the history and development of the Mediterranean lands.

Professor Mary Beard is a Professor of Classics and a Fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge. She is the Classics editor of the Times Literary Supplement and her blog, 'A Don's Life' appears in ̽��ֱ��Times as a regular column. She has written widely on Classical culture and its reception in the modern world, and her latest book, 'Pompeii: the Life of a Roman Town' is soon to be adapted into a BBC series.

Professor Christopher Clark is a Professor of Modern European History and a Fellow at St Catharine's College. Born and educated in Australia, Clark became a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 2007. His research interests include the history of 19th century Germany and continental Europe, but his current work focuses on the outbreak of war in 1914 and political change across Europe in the aftermath of the 1848 revolutions.

Dr Alan Baker was elected in 1970 as the first ever teaching Fellow of Geography at Emmanuel College and is now a Life Fellow. From 2001 until this year, Dr Baker was a Cambridge City Councillor and chaired its Planning Committee for seven years.

His research focuses upon the social, economic and cultural geography of 19th century France. In 1997 the French government recognised his "services to French culture" through awarding the Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Palmes Académiques.

Professor Deborah Howard is Professor of Architectural History and a Fellow of St John's College. Her research interests include the art and architecture of Venice and the Veneto and the relationship between Italy and the Eastern Mediterranean. She recently co-ordinated a major research project on 'Architecture and Music in Renaissance Venice'.

Professor Juliet Mitchell is Emeritus Professor of Psychoanalysis and Gender Studies and a Fellow of Jesus College. She is the Founder Director of the Centre for Gender Studies at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and a Research Fellow at the Department of Human Geography. Her research looks at gender difference from a psychoanalytic and social history perspective and examines the sibling relationship in different contexts.

Dr Karalyn Patterson is a Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Clinical Neurosciences. She is currently studying the effects that brain disease and damage have upon adult language and memory. She has published her findings in a variety of scientific journals.

Dr Andrew Wallace-Hadrill is Master of Sidney Sussex College and will be Professor in the Faculty of Classics from October 2010. He is a Roman social and cultural historian with a particular interest in Pompeii and Herculaneum. He was the Director of the British School at Rome from 1995 until 2009, and was made an OBE in the New Year's Honours for services to Anglo-Italian cultural relations.

On hearing of her election, Professor Mary Beard said: "I am overwhelmed, touched, honoured and very aware of the responsibility of becoming a Fellow of the British Academy. It's a cliché to say that these are difficult times, but true all the same."

"We Classicists know what a world without Humanities is - it's the Dark Ages. My job, and all the more now, is not just to resist the forces of darkness, but to make clear why the Humanities are not an optional extra for times of plenty, but central to everything we, as a culture, do."

̽��ֱ��scholars will become the newest members of the British Academy which currently consists of over 1,000 academics. ̽��ֱ��British Academy not only recognises academic achievement, but also helps fund national and international research and organises a wide-ranging programme of public events.

̽��ֱ��British Academy has today announced the scholars elected for this year&rsquo;s Fellowships in recognition of their contribution to the humanities and social sciences.

I am overwhelmed, touched, honoured and very aware of the responsibility of becoming a Fellow of the British Academy. It's a cliché to say that these are difficult times, but true all the same.

Professor Mary Beard

Sir Cam

Senate House

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