Not that some in the U.S. don't pay attention to the Mediterranean as a region with a long collective history:
http://www.stanford.edu/group/mediterranean/home/index.html
Mediterranean Studies at Stanford University provides a forum for scholars to explore the interplay between societies, cultures, and communities around the Mediterranean Basin from the Middle Ages to the present. Its focus is on all aspects of co-existence and conflict that have marked these encounters in the empires, port cities, nation-states, and transregional and transnational social, religious, cultural, economic contexts of the Levant, Anatolia, the Balkans, Southern Europe and North Africa. It is also interested in the multiple relations of the Mediterranean with other regions and areas of the world.
http://www.cmrs.ucla.edu/mediterranean.html
The field of Mediterranean Studies seeks to undo the long-held ideas of the "homogeneity of the West" and the "exoticism of the East." The Mediterranean Sea does not keep continental landmasses apart, rather, it is a body of water that allows for fluidity and openness, connecting different worlds in a network that has shaped local social, commercial, political, and cultural developments. Whether these encounters and contacts happened in the mode of conflict (military and/or confessional) or exchange (commercial, artistic, or scientific), it is doubtless that they helped diffuse and transmit ideas, commodities, technologies, and even systems of thought. The cross-cultural, cross-linguistic, and cross-confessional exchange that has occurred over an extremely long period of time makes the Mediterranean a region of global importance.
and more: