Annual Research Theme

At the heart of the Mediterranean, the island of Sicily has been shaped by interactions between indigenous, Greek, Phoenician-Punic, and Roman peoples, as well as by its connections with southern Italy, the western and eastern Mediterranean, and North Africa. Although Sicily’s role as a ‘crossroads’ has long been emphasised in scholarship, the metaphor often carries misleading assumptions: on the one hand, visions of harmonious hyper-connectivity between organised, balanced, domesticated spaces; on the other, conceptions of insularity that cast islands as isolated, peripheral places requiring external intervention and top-down integration.  

Our theme revisits these paradigms by bringing together scholars of different periods and disciplines to test the static assumptions and historiographical consequences that the ‘crossroads’ metaphor carries with it, in order to investigate the uncomfortable, uncertain and unsettled edges of the island’s history. Rather than treating Sicily simply as a passive geographical junction between larger powers, the theme will explore the ways in which insularity itself shaped patterns of mobility, exchange, occupation, resistance, marginalisation, and identity formation. Attention will also be paid to uneven forms of connectivity across regions, communities, and chronological periods, asking how networks were created, maintained, contested, or disrupted. In doing so, the conference which will close out the research theme will seek to reconsider Sicily not only as a ‘junction’ between worlds, but also as a place with its own local trajectories, internal dynamics, and distinctive cultural responses to Mediterranean interaction.

Going beyond the “crossroads” paradigm towards a transmodern and critically reflexive approach has implications for other regions of both the ancient (and contemporary) world that have been conceptualised primarily as geographical junctions within colonial and globalising frameworks. The theme will also help advance studies of Mediterranean interactions generally beyond traditional narratives of insularity as isolation and the new orthodoxy of connectivity. It will therefore contribute to broader decolonial debates across disciplines by rethinking Sicily’s place within Mediterranean history not as a point of convergence between worlds, but as a historically contingent space that actively shaped the worlds to which it was connected.