“Why Deserted Islands Matter in History: The Fearsome Commons”

Professor Amy G. Remensnyder (Brown University)

The Faculty of History is delighted to welcome Professor Amy G. Remensnyder (Brown University) as the guest speaker for the 2026 Trevelyan Lectures, offering four lectures in a series titled Why Deserted Islands Matter in History: The Fearsome Commons.

Dates: Monday 2nd - Friday 13th November

Time: 5-6pm

Location: Lecture Theatre A (Arts School, New Museums Site), Bene't St, Cambridge

This lecture series proposes a history of deserted islands that liberates them from the romantic roles to which they have been confined by scholarship and popular culture, that is, as seductive sites of fantasy, wonder, and fear that excite literary imagination, philosophical reflection, and explorers’ appetite. Drawing on methodologies from island studies, environmental humanities, Mediterranean studies, and the oceanic and material turns, these talks show how these uninhabited fragments of land ubiquitous in so many seas were active presences in the past. They harbor the potential to tell big new histories of the tangible relationship between the marine environment and humans—as well as of the marine environment’s capacity to mediate material relations among humans that would have been impossible elsewhere. These lectures explore these and other questions through the deep past of the tiny central Mediterranean island of Lampedusa. Today an epicenter and potent symbol of Europe’s migrant crisis, this island occupied an equally exceptional, renowned, and outsized place in a maritime geography of need created by mobile people during an earlier era of saltwater human trafficking, that is, the so-called golden age of early modern Mediterranean piracy between 1550 and 1750. Lampedusa was then a famed, uninhabited, stateless island whose natural attributes converged with the geopolitics of piracy to make extraordinary encounters between Europeans and North Africans ordinary and even necessary there. In these waters beyond the state, the needs of captors and captives alike worked together with Lampedusa’s natural attributes in ways that benefitted both them and this deserted island to create an exceptional, shared, green oasis edged with violence. There, Muslims and Christians, free and unfree, shared a cave shrine that was the product of a singular form of maritime cooperation between European and North African pirates that transcended religious lines and political enmities to express silent solidarities between these men as well as their rough compassion for people fleeing enslavement. Excavating this partnership between nature and humans that was embedded in maritime violence and conditioned by need opens a new blue, deserted island-centric history from below of early modern Mediterranean piracy, escape, interfaith cooperation, shared religious sites, and the sea of danger that produced them all. This lecture series is thus a classic exercise in microhistory, tackling a subject small in scale, yet large in meaning.

Monday 2nd November

LECTURE 1 MAKING: THE CREATION OF A PIRATES’ ISLAND

By exploring how and why North African and European pirates established an intimate relationship with the deserted island of Lampedusa, this lecture reveals piracy as an agent of environmental change and questions the connotations of failure, collapse, and catastrophe so often attributed to landscapes abandoned by humans.

*This opening lecture will be followed by a drinks reception in the Atrium at 6pm.

Friday 6th November

LECTURE 2 SHARING: A PIRATES’ SHRINE FOR A PIRATES’ ISLAND

In exploring the exceptional forms of religious sharing between Muslim and Christian corsairs at Lampedusa’s famous cave shrine and how they were enabled by the island, this lecture shifts the perspective on shared shrines from land to sea and opens up rarely charted reaches of pirates’ religious attitudes and practices, where historians’ debates about whether corsair expeditions were motivated by fervor for holy war or desire for profit recede and questions about pirates’ collective religious response to the marine environment and its dangers come to the fore.

Monday 9th November

LECTURE 3 OFFERING: THE MATERIAL CULTURE OF MARITIME COOPERATION

This lecture demonstrates how the custom of offering maritime necessities at Lampedusa’s shrine embodied exceptional cooperation from below that cut across religious lines and political enmities to express strategic and situational solidarities among pirates. The capacity of these men to collaborate to meet their collective practical needs in these waters beyond the state shows how in arenas of violent conflict, material things can become tacit forms of mutually beneficial forms of cooperation.

Friday 13th November

LECTURE 4 ESCAPING: MARITIME FUGITIVE GEOGRAPHIES

This lecture focuses on how and why in this era when hundreds of thousands of people all around the Mediterranean lost their liberty to corsairs, Lampedusa—a

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