Cruising through Europe’s South-Eastern Periphery in the Nineteenth Century: Steamships, the Transportation-Communication Revolution and ‘Social Media’

The advent of steamships on the world's rivers and seas revolutionized economic, political, and cultural realities wherever they started plying. Steamships served as agents of modernization that galvanized regional and global mobility with their ability to convey passengers and cargo relatively inexpensively, rapidly, and safely. This paper aims to turn steamships into arenas of global history and explore the social dimension of cruising by looking at the sociality engendered by the coming of the transportation revolution to the Black Sea and the Eastern Mediterranean. While gliding along a politically disputed borderland that separated - and connected - the Austrian, Ottoman, and Russian empires, steamships themselves became busy platform where voyagers from all corners of the globe engaged in various social exchanges.

**********

New Europe College announces the launch of a series of conferences organised in collaboration with NETIAS (Network of European Institutes for Advanced Study). Researchers from different fields and from various European centres invite us - every last Thursday of the month - to reflect on knowledge in a digital age. In December, due to the winter holidays, the lecture will be given on the second Thursday of the month.

The first semester promises some fascinating forays into South-East European history (Constantin Ardeleanu, New Europe College), computer science (Violeta Ivanova-Rohling, Zukunftskolleg - University of Konstanz), history of science and technology (Lino Camprubi, Institut d'Etudes Avancées d'Aix-Marseille Université) and radiology (Ruben Pauwels, Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies).