Institutional papers and editorial discourse
Two distinct bodies of knowledge: permanent academic outputs and a fluid flow of reflections, interventions, and focus country materials.
Papers & Research
Academic outputs produced post-edition. Permanent contributions to the study of Mediterranean publishing.
Papers from the 2025 edition are in preparation.
Reflections & Interventions
A fluid flow of editorial content: reflections, focus country materials, conversations.
The Frame Precedes the Book
This extends a line opened at the 2025 edition, on translation and how cultures are represented.
Cultural diplomacy presents itself as a handshake between curious cultures. But along most of the routes that matter in the Mediterranean, what moves in one direction does not resemble what moves in the other. The Northern book is allowed to be individual. The Southern book is asked to be typical.
A Canon You Can Name
It follows a problem the 2025 fellowship kept returning to: how a small literature makes a tradition.
The canon of a major literature behaves like geology, the deposit of centuries that no single person controls. The canon of a small or young literature behaves like architecture. It was built, recently, by hands that can be named.
Planning to Last
A reading of the National Book Council of Malta's 2025-2030 strategy, occasioned by Malta's year as the fellowship's focus country.
In August 2025 the National Book Council of Malta published a five-year strategy for the country's book sector, running to 2030. A national book council serving a language read by a few hundred thousand people had decided to plan its literary ecosystem the way a far larger market would. The decision to treat a small book culture as something to be engineered, and not merely encouraged, is the part that matters most.
The Wrong Building
Prompted by the 2024 edition's session on leadership, and by an unease with the language it inherited.
The glass ceiling is a metaphor with an address: the large corporation, with its visible ladder. Applied to small and independent Mediterranean publishing, almost every assumption it carries fails. The metaphor describes the wrong building, and a wrong description produces a wrong remedy.
Working Within the Map
This started from one contested word in the 2024 fellowship's conversations on translation.
There is a word that publishing professionals use constantly and almost never examine: peripheral. The term does useful work in conversation, and precisely for this reason it deserves suspicion.