BIP “Mobility and Exchanges” Paris 8

Mobility and Exchanges in History, March 16^th-22^th 2025, Paris, International Workshop

 Gathering scholars from four universities, the workshop will investigate the close connections between human mobility and exchanges broadly defined throughout history, from Ancient to Modern Times.

The individual and population movement was essential to the survival and development of human societies. Trade, wars, networks, migrants and refugees connected communities distant from each other, from east and west or from north and south. These movements resulted in particular changes and adaptations of local cultures and identities, that revealed patterns of religious, political, social, economic and social life. In this approach, the connections and mobilities offer us keys to understanding the history and development of local communities, countries and regions.

In a modern world dominated by globalization, the workshop will explore a variety of genres and categories of human mobility and exchanges, i.e.: migration, mobility, economic exchanges, political exchanges, networks, identities, religion and culture.

These subjects will be discussed in working groups and thematic sessions, and they will be studied across a variety of sources, including texts and iconographic documents.

The instability of ancient, medieval and modern communities provoked migration, displacement and relocation of thousands or even millions of people. According to the UN Refugee Agency, more than 117 million people were forcibly displaced in the world at the end of 2023, including internally displaced people, refugees and asylum-seekers. If the intention to regulate migration and to define different statuses of migrants appears in modern times, the ancient and medieval communities were also confronted with different phenomena of population and individual movements.

Historians have used and opposed different notions to study these phenomena: connectedness and isolation, localism and globalism, and static a

nd dynamic societies. In a broader historical approach, assessing how modern concepts can be applied to other periods of history will be useful.

Several questions will be discussed by the workshop’s participants (students and scholars) through both case studies and the longue durée perspective. For instance: What kind of interactions existed between migrants and the people they encountered abroad? What were the receiving community reactions and responses to individual and population movements? Did human mobility bring innovation? How did social, political or religious networks shape local identity? How did exchanges and societies influence one another? What was circulating in each context together with people: things, ideas, identities, animals?

 Programme 

 Thematic Sessions of the Workshop

 Session I:

1. Pothiti Hantzaroula, Asian Minor refugees in Greece after 1922: Emotions, identities and transgenerational conflict
2. Maria Buko, Fixing war-torn Europe the Swiss way. Relocation of war-affected children to Switzerland during World War II and the immediate postwar years.

Session II:

3. Carole Mabboux, Political exile, a privileged moment for the circulation of manuscripts and the dissemination of governmental models (Italy-France, 13th century)
4. Mariana Malinova, Traveling Texts and the Pathways of Translation in Medieval Baghdad (9th-10th Centuries)

Session III:

5. Svetla Ianeva, Merchants from the Ottoman Balkans as economic, social and cultural go-betweens during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
6. Alexis Drach, European networks of bankers and regulators in second half of the 20^th century : states and finance navigating globalisation.

Session IV:

7. Dimitra Vassiliadou, The Greeks in love: An intimate history of erotic discourses and sexual desire in the long nineteenth century
8. Claudia Roesch, Maintaining Emotional Ties over Space and Time: 19th century German immigrant letters as a source for the history of the family

Session V:

9. Maya Vassileva, The Journey of a Goddess: The Cult of Kybele
10. Adrian Robu, Migration and Religious Identity in Archaic Greece (8^th-6^th BC)