Discussing the Mediterranean as a colonial sea in modern times, historians tend to relate this with the French presence in the region –with Napoleon and his expedition in Egypt (1798) considered as the starting point. Britain was the other major power active in the region. Since the second part of the 19th century, the Mediterranean became virtually a British sea. Nevertheless, when Napoleon appeared on the Mediterranean scene in 1797, Russia was already a central actor in the region. The Russo-Ottoman War of 1768-1774 brought Russia to the “warm waters” of the Mediterranean in an era of imperial and global ambitions, wars, uprisings, and various other forms of turbulence and insecurity on a global scale. The Mediterranean politics of Russia were multi-level and had to deal with various Mediterranean entities: Venice, French, Spain, and Portugal (including the fate of their overseas colonial empires), the Ionian Islands, the Aegean islands, Malta, Minorca, Lebanon, Egypt; and with the peoples living there: Greek-speaking, Slav-speaking, Albanian-speaking, Turkish-speaking and Arab-speaking Orthodox and Muslim communities (the later notably in Egypt and Greater Syria). Dr. Dialla will explore the beginnings of the Russian presence in the region and the preliminaries of the entangled character of Russian and Mediterranean historical experiences. More specifically, she will (a) trace how the Russian Empire became a Mediterranean power in 1770, entangled with the British, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Ottoman empires, and (b) explore the vast network of various Mediterranean diasporas, expatriates, revolutionaries, politicians, and intellectuals who participated in Russian, Mediterranean, European, and even global, transnational networks in which people, discourses, and practices, traveling in space and time, with various deviations from west to east, north, and south and the other way round, influenced by the novel cultural spaces and also influencing them.
This event will take place in person and on Zoom. Both our in person and Zoom format will be fully open to the public. Access the Zoom meeting here. Non-NYU affiliates must RSVP. The Jordan Center is located at 19 University Place, on the second floor.
Dr. Ada Dialla is a European and Russian History Professor at the Department of Theory and History of Art, School of Fine Arts (Athens). She has studied History at the School of History, State University of Moscow (Lοmonosov) (B.A. and M.Sc.), the Department of History and Archaeology of the University of Athens, and the Department of Political Science of the University of Athens. She was a visiting researcher at the Russian Academy of Science (St Petersburg), at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris) at the Jordan Center for Advanced Studies in Russia of New York University, and at Princeton University. She is a founding member and chair of the Athens-based Governing Board of the Research Center for the Humanities. Her recent publications include Humanitarian Intervention in the Long Nineteenth Century. Setting the Precedent (with Alexis Heraclides, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015); “Mediterranean Diasporas: Politics and Ideas in the Long 19th Century”, Roundtable: Jussi Kurunmäki, Bernard Heyberger, Ada Dialla, Konstantina Zanou, Maurizio Isabella, Global Intellectual History, 2018 https://doi.org/10.1080/23801883.2018.1433284; “The Congress of Vienna, the Russian Empire, and the Greek Revolution: Rethinking Legitimacy,” Journal of Modern Greek Studies, May 2021; 1821: What Made it Greek? What Made it Revolutionary?, Special Issue, Historein. A Review of the Past and Other Stories, 20, no 1 (2021), with Yanni Kotsonis; The Russian Empire and the Greek Speaking World. Local, European, and Global Stories in the Age of Revolutions (Athens: Alexandreia, 2023, in Greek).
