The “Mediterranean” program at Iméra, the Institute for Advanced Study (IEA) at Aix Marseille Université, is open to researchers, artists, and thinkers from all disciplines. Under the framework of the transdisciplinary field of “Mediterranean Studies,” the program is resolutely transregional, transnational, and transversal, encompassing the Mediterranean societies and networks of Anatolia, the Balkans, the Levant, North Africa, and Southern Europe (including France).
Five chairs are associated with this program: the Averroes Chair, the Germaine Tillion Chair, the Albert Hirschman Chair, the Fulbright/Iméra in Migration Studies Chair, and the Mucem Chair in partnership with the “Arts & Sciences: Indisciplined Knowledge” program at Iméra.
The Mediterranean program is organized around five main research axes:
* The construction of narratives on migration and mobility around the Mediterranean from antiquity to the present day, through a reflection on the relationship with otherness, citizenship, and exile, and the extraterritorial circulation of ideas, goods, and people. It pays attention to the temporalities of migratory trajectories, Mediterranean diasporas, and the diversity of Mediterranean languages.
Also check: The Fulbright/Iméra Chair on Migration Studies
* The complexity of the entanglement of colonial legacies that shape contemporary supranational, national, economic, social, religious, and gendered reconfigurations and identities. It explores the various ways in which individuals and entities are connected to a shared sea that is a zone of contacts, conflicts, and civilizational encounters. It is studied through its historical, cartographic, cinematographic, economic, geopolitical, and other representations.
Also check: the Albert Hirschman Chair
* The Mediterranean in the era of the Anthropocene and issues related to bioclimatic history, climate change, water and coastal management, insularity, marine depths, and the consequences of mass tourism. The cross-cutting question of the patrimonialization of Mediterranean spaces mobilizes this axis, as well as that of the four other so-called Mediterranean ecosystems (California, central Chile, southern Australia, South Africa / Cape region).
Also check: the Germaine Tillion Chair
* The question of religion in the Mediterranean, particularly through the practices of Islam in the Mediterranean in relation to other religions in the Mediterranean region.
Also check: the Averroes Chair
* La fabrique de la Méditerranée revolves around two main orientations:
- Archives of Mediterranean societies: archiving lifestyles through an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approach (architecture, urban and maritime cultures, gastronomy, museums, musicology, private life, sports, etc.), including in digital form and facing the challenge of artificial intelligence.
- The invention of the Mediterranean: the construction and problematization of the field of Mediterranean studies. It also involves going beyond the dominant binary narrative of the “two shores” to explore the concept of the “third shore” and question the exportation of the idea of the Mediterranean—how to “Mediterraneanize” elsewhere, particularly by examining diasporic connections and the notion of Mediterranean cultural transfers.
Also check: the Mucem Chair in partnership with the “Arts & Sciences: Indisciplined Knowledge” program at Iméra
The Mediterranean program at Iméra was conceived and directed by Thierry Fabre from 2017 to 2022.
The program was directed from September 2023 to July 2025 by Marie-Pierre Ulloa.
