European Slaves:
Christians in African
Pirate Encounters

News: 

Newspaper Article
"Menschenhandel im Mittelmeerraum", Die Presse, June 9 2018.

Lecture
Robert Spindler (Innsbruck), "Renegados: Converted Christians in British Barbary Captivity Narratives." at the International Symposium Buccaneers, Corsairs, Pirates and Privateers: Connecting the Early Modern Seas at the Bielefeld University, 13.04.2018.

Lecture
Robert Spindler (Innsbruck), "Three Early Modern Barbary Captivity Narratives in the German Language and their Portrayal of Islam" for the Mediterranean Collaborative, Consortium for the Study of the Premodern World at the University of Minnesota, 08.11.2017.

Lecture
Robert Spindler (Innsbruck), "Masters, Agusins and Renegados: Portrayals of Muslims in Early Modern Barbary Captivity Narratives from Germany and Austria" for the SAGES Program at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, 04.11.2017.

Newspaper article
"Auf zum Entern!", Der Standard.

Lecture
Robert Spindler (Innsbruck), "Merckwürdige Lebens- und Reisebeschreibung: Der Bericht des Johann Michael Kühn" at the workshop "Erzählen zwischen Fakt und Fiktion" in Innsbruck, 23.02.2017.

Article
German article about our conference on "Piracy and Captivity in the Mediterranean: 1530-1810" in Innsbruck.

Newspaper article
"Als christlicher Gefangener unter Piraten", Der Standard.

Contact us:

Mario Klarer
Project Leader

Phone:
+43 (0)512 507 4172

Fax:
+43 (0)512 507 2879

E-mail:
mario.klarer@uibk.ac.at

Mail:
Institut für Amerikastudien
Universität Innsbruck
Innrain 52
6020 Innsbruck
AUSTRIA

ESCAPE

The research project focuses on early modern—that is, mostly sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenth-century—survivor narratives by Europeans who were enslaved on North Africa’s Barbary Coast. Centerpiece of the research effort is an anthology of shorter unedited slave or captivity narratives. Unlike previous research the project primarily focuses on survivor narratives from a literary perspective. These memoirs will be treated as an independent narrative text type or genre, which shares features of the modern novel but predates it by more than a century.