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Hamish Forbes
Honorary Research Fellow,
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Biography
Statement of research interests
My overarching research interests concern the integration of ethnographic data and agendas relating to contemporary peoples and their recent pasts with ways in which academics endeavour to understand the "deeper" past, be that an archaeological past or a historical one.
A particular focus of my research has been on landscapes and the way they have been "worked" both physically and conceptually. Geographically my focus has been especially on Greece and, more recently, also Italy, and the northern Mediterranean zone more generally. These landscapes are very different, both in their ecologies and their histories from those of northern Europe and North America, the zones which have traditionally provided the bulk of scholars who have studied these inherently "other" environments. These scholars have often informed their understanding of the pasts of these landscapes, and the landscapes' indigenous human populations, via their own, home landscapes and histories, to provide a reflection of themselves. The underlying aim of my research, therefore has been to understand these "other" environments and societies via the ways in which contemporary and recent indigenous populations have engaged with them in order to provide alternative narratives for the "deeper" past.
Teaching Summary
Not currently teaching
Research Summary
Late post-medieval landscapes in the Bova Marina area of southern Calabria, Italy
Agricultural change in the 20th century in the Lake Kopaida area of Boiotia