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Renaissance Refugees: Negotiating Displacement in the Early Modern Mediterranean
May 5 @ 3:00 pm - 4:00 pm PDT
Monday, May 5, 2025
3:00 PM | Royce Hall 23
About the Lecture
During the early modern period, campaigns of ethnic cleansing forced entire populations to flee, creating diasporic networks across the Mediterranean and beyond. Ferdinand of Aragon’s “pious cruelty” as Machiavelli famously put it in the Prince, set an example that was repeatedly imitated by European rulers to consolidate sovereignty and enforce religious uniformity. How did refugees cope with mass expulsions? Far from being voiceless victims, they wrote eloquently about displacement in dozens of texts, contributing to the creation of ‘refugee literature.’ As this talk argues, writing provided refugees not only with a new home that filled the void of their lost homeland but also with a forum through which asylum policies were negotiated
About the Presenter
Diego Pirillo is the UCLA 2025 Charles Speroni Endowed Chair in Medieval Renaissance Literature and Culture. He is a Professor and Chair of Italian Studies at UC Berkeley, where he also serves as the Director of the Renaissance and Early Modern Studies (REMS) graduate program and as an Affiliate Faculty member in the History department. His work explores how mobility, displacement, and colonialism shaped the intellectual and cultural life of early modern Europe and the Atlantic world. His forthcoming book, The Atlantic Republic of Letters: Knowledge and Colonialism in the Age of Franklin (University of Pennsylvania Press), examines the intellectual history of colonialism in early America, showing how Enlightenment scholars served as agents of empire, silencing their ties to chattel slavery and coordinating the dispossession of Indigenous people.