Geraldine Heng (Univ. Texas at Austin) has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Sean Field (University of Vemont) will be a Fellow at the National Humanities Center in 2023-24, where he will be working on a new project entitled Women Writing Saints’ Lives: Gendered Authority and Female Authorship in the Middle Ages.
Congratulations! If you have good news to share, please send it to Executive Director Lisa Fagin Davis.
Special Projects Assistant
Medieval Academy of America
15 hours/wk (hybrid)
$30/hr (no benefits)
The Medieval Academy of America, an educational non-profit organization incorporated as a 501(c)3 in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, seeks a Special Projects Assistant to work with the Executive Director, the Editor of Speculum, and other administrative and Speculum staff on various projects, both in the Boston office and remotely. The position is offered for 15 hours per week at $30 per hour, without medical or retirement benefits. Interest in and knowledge about the Middle Ages is ideal, but there are no degree or foreign-language requirements. While many of the position’s responsibilities can be accomplished remotely, easy access to the MAA’s downtown Boston office is necessary as the job will often entail working onsite in collaboration with other staff members.
Responsibilities will include (but will not be limited to):
Remote:
Onsite:
To apply, please forward a CV and cover letter stating experience, qualifications, and interest to Executive Director Lisa Fagin Davis LFD@TheMedievalAcademy.org by MAY 15. Position to begin on or around June 15.
19 April 2023
We, the Advocacy Committee of the Medieval Academy of America, denounce the anti-LGBTQ+ legislation sweeping the U.S.A., such as the 467 anti-LGBTQ bills currently being tracked by the American Civil Liberties Union. These affronts to trans and gender non-conforming individuals are an overreach of civil liberties and personal autonomy that will drastically harm not only some of our most vulnerable colleagues and loved ones, but also the cultural integrity of the U.S.A. This path, as history shows, drives us ever closer to outright fascism.
Medieval studies encourages a critical approach to our modern norms, and so one of the benefits of trans experiences and queer praxis is the framework for interrogating the modern assumptions regarding genders and bodies that some unwittingly impose upon the Middle Ages. We employ “trans” as an umbrella term that aims to include a range of experiences.
Trans people have a long and rich history that includes the Middle Ages in its broadest geographical and chronological breadth. As a discipline, too, our trans colleagues have long been contributing to the field of medieval studies. Therefore, we have some catch-up work to do. We are ethically bound to build a more inclusive medieval studies that welcomes diverse perspectives and colleagues for the vitality of the field. Moreover, we have a responsibility to advocate for our LGTBQ+ colleagues’ belonging as both independent scholars and those working in higher education. Reclaiming early trans experiences from the medieval past helps to maintain the vitality of the field as a space for innovative scholarship that critically intersects with our students’ lived experiences.
We issue this statement as a public demonstration of support for our trans colleagues to both value their contributions to the field and to encourage medievalists to do the necessary work in their own institutions and communities, as members of the Medieval Academy have begun through their scholarship. Our trans colleagues, including neuroscientist Atom J. Lesiak, have expressed a need for greater structural support. The fields of medieval studies frequently “shut out transgender bodies” (33), as Dr. Gabrielle M.W. Bychowski notes in an article co-authored with Professor Dorothy Kim, “Visions of Medieval Trans Feminism.” Based on their insights, in the context of medieval studies, we encourage:
Selected Publications and Scholarship from Medieval Academy Members:
Five recent articles and presidential addresses published in Speculum:
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/journals/spc/spc-perspectives
The Regulation of ‘Sodomy’ in the Latin East and West
Ruth Mazo Karras, Speculum 95:4 (2020)
Cultural Encounter, Race, and a Humanist Ideology of Empire in the Art of Trecento Venice
Thomas E. A. Dale, Speculum 98:1 (2023)
What Did Medieval Slavery Look Like? Color, Race, and Unfreedom in Later Medieval Iberia
Pamela A. Patton, Speculum 97:3 (2022)
Personification and Gender Fluidity in the Psychomachia and its Early Reception
Katharine Breen, Speculum 97:4 (2022)
Petrarch’s Queer History
Anna Wilson, Speculum 95:3 (2020)
Borderland Anxieties: Lisān al-Dīn ibn al-Khatị̄b (d. 1374): the Politics of Genealogy in Late Medieval Granada
Mohamad Ballan, Speculum 98:2 (2023)
“Medieval Trans Studies”: https://rss.com/podcasts/mmapodcast/463742/
Visions of Medieval Trans Feminism: An Introduction
M. W. Bychowski and Dorothy Kim
https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2185&context=mff
https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/61200
Transgender Lives in the Middle Ages through Art, Literature, and Medicine Roland Betancourt, University of California, Irvine
https://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/outcasts/downloads/betancourt_transgender_lives.pdf
This special issue of Medieval Feminist Forum could be useful, too — particularly M. W. Bychowski and Dorothy Kim’s Intro. https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/mff/vol55/iss1/
To encourage the integration of Byzantine studies within the scholarly community and medieval studies in particular, the Mary Jaharis Center for Byzantine Art and Culture seeks proposals for a Mary Jaharis Center sponsored session at the 59th International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, May 9–11, 2024. We invite session proposals on any topic relevant to Byzantine studies.
Session proposals must be submitted through the Mary Jaharis Center website. The deadline for submission is May 15, 2023.
If the proposed session is approved, the Mary Jaharis Center will reimburse a maximum of 4 session participants (presenters and moderator) up to $800 maximum for scholars traveling from North America and up to $1400 maximum for those traveling from outside North America. Funding is through reimbursement only; advance funding cannot be provided. Eligible expenses include conference registration, transportation, and food and lodging. Receipts are required for reimbursement. Participants must participate in the conference in-person to receive funding. The Mary Jaharis Center regrets that it cannot reimburse participants who have last-minute cancellations and are unable to attend the conference.
For further details and submission instructions, please visit https://maryjahariscenter.org/sponsored-sessions/59th-icms.
Please contact Brandie Ratliff (mjcbac@hchc.edu), Director, Mary Jaharis Center for Byzantine Art and Culture with any questions.
East of Byzantium is pleased to announce the final lecture in its 2022–2023 lecture series.
Tuesday, April 25, 2023 | 12:00 PM EDT | Zoom
The Öngüt Connection: Christianity among the Turks of Medieval Eurasia
Joel Walker | University of Washington, Seattle
Early and influential allies of Chinggis Khan, the Öngüt Turks of Inner Mongolia played a pivotal role in the rise of the Mongol Empire (1206–1368). Their adoption of “Nestorian” Christianity represents the culmination of a broad stream of Turkic Christian tradition in medieval Eurasia. The careers of the ascetic Marqos of Koshang, who became the East-Syrian patriarch Yahballaha III (1281–1317), and the ruler Giwargis, the Mongol-appointed “Prince of Gaotang” (d. 1298 or 1299), help reveal the distinctive contours of the Öngüt Christian tradition.
Joel Walker is the Lawrence J. Roseman Associate Professor of History at the University of Washington, Seattle. Trained as a historian of Late Antiquity, his publications include: The Legend of Mar Qardagh: Narrative and Christian Heroism in Late Antique Iraq (2006); “From Nisibis to Xi’an: The Church of the East in Late Antique Eurasia” (2012); and “Luminous Markers: Pearls and Royal Authority in Late Antique Iran and Eurasia” (2018). Current projects include Witness to the Mongols: A Global History Sourcebook (co-authored with Stefan Kamola) and a history of cattle in the Ancient World.
Advance registration required. Register: https://eastofbyzantium.org/upcoming-events/
Contact Brandie Ratliff (mjcbac@hchc.edu), Director, Mary Jaharis Center for Byzantine Art and Culture, with any questions.
An East of Byzantium lecture. EAST OF BYZANTIUM is a partnership between the Mashtots Professor of Armenian Studies at Harvard University and the Mary Jaharis Center for Byzantine Art and Culture that explores the cultures of the eastern frontier of the Byzantine empire in the late antique and medieval periods.
In response to the ongoing assault on and censorship of CRS and LGBTQ+ studies in curricula and library collections across the US, the Editorial Board of Speculum, in collaboration with our publisher, the University of Chicago Press, is making five recent articles (and two presidential addresses) free to read on our website. While all embed themselves in the groundwork established by these areas of study, they also seek to open up fresh fields of inquiry and bring new perspectives to venerable topics, thereby immensely enriching our field of medieval studies. Explore the full collection here:
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/journals/spc/spc-perspectives
A virtual conference hosted by the University of Pennsylvania and the Dance Studies Association’s Early Dance Working Group
What does it look like for historical expressions of dancing and movement arts to break out of traditional academic and performative boxes? How do scholars and practitioners escape the boundaries of discipline, chronology, geography, and methodology subsumed under the conventional appellation of “early dance”? Conversely, how can we demonstrate the ways in which our work complements and completes the work of other disciplines in light of these distinctions? This symposium explores early dance as an idea, a time, a place, a locus of cultural meaning and aims to draw together scholars working across disciplines and geographies who are nevertheless invested in “early” dance and movement.
We invite papers for this virtual symposium from scholars across disciplines, exploring aspects of dance and movement from all methodological perspectives, finding commonality in the antecedental nature of their work. Whether looking at the musical, literary, cultural, political, religious, or social contexts of dance, or expanding knowledge of its somatic and kinesthetic dimensions, we find unity in the chronological earliness of our work. We encourage papers that explore dance outside of Western European frameworks of knowledge and movement production, including comparative or transhistorical perspectives on pre-1800 or “early” dance.
Submission due date: Sept. 15, 2023
Notification of acceptance by Nov. 1, 2023
Submit proposals via submission portal:
MAA Graduate Student Committee Community Outreach Workshop
Apr 18, 2023 10:30 AM – 12:00 PM (EDT)
The GSC has in recent years emphasized both a focus on building a global community of graduate students studying the Middle Ages and on developing public-facing content about the medieval period for specialists and non-specialists alike. In this workshop, we seek to bring these two nodes together. How can we take medieval studies outside of the university classroom (and the home office) and into the wider community? How do we identify interested communities? What kinds of projects are effective for communicating information about the Middle Ages responsibly? In this workshop, the GSC seeks to assist participants in creating opportunities for community engagement by bringing together a panel of medievalists who have created such projects.
Speakers include:
Alessia Rossi and Alice Sullivan, North of Byzantium
Alex Korte and Michelle Hamilton, University of Minnesota Medieval Books in Schools Program
Christopher Fletcher, Race Before Race
Claire Dillon, Medievalist Toolkit
Click here to register.
Greetings from the editor’s desk at Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies. This month we are delighted to highlight the research published in the April 98/2 (2023) issue. The five articles published here admirably fulfill our mission to showcase new work drawn from across the many fields that make up medieval studies. Kyle Harper’s “The First Plague Pandemic in Italy” opens the issue with a contribution to the lively field of plague studies. It is a close examination of the contemporary textual evidence for the Justinianic plague, demonstrating the impact of the pandemic on the Italian peninsula. Kara Gaston’s interdisciplinary piece, “The Place of Poetry in Sacrobosco’s Sphere: Astronomy and Interpretation,” illuminates Johannes Sacrobosco’s practice of using poetry as interpretation in his Tractatus de sphera, a thirteenth-century astronomy textbook. Mohamad Ballan, an early career scholar, grounds his work firmly in al-Andalus in “Borderland Anxieties: Lisān al-Dīn ibn al-Khatị̄b (d. 1374) and the Politics of Genealogy in Late Medieval Granada.” Contributing to ongoing discussions of race, racialization, and ethnicity in the medieval period, his article analyzes, among other things, how Nasrid elites articulated “Arabness” as a marker of identity in late medieval Granada. “Sacred Shivering,” by Ravinder S. Binning, another early career scholar, examines how the story of the Forty Martyrs of Sebaste sacralized the act of shivering in two tenth-century Byzantine ivories. And finally, Sebastian Sobecki’s “Authorized Realities: The Gesta Romanorum and Thomas Hoccleve’s Poetics of Autobiography” rounds out the issue by arguing that the surviving manuscript evidence supports Thomas Hoccleve’s narrative persona.
From publications we turn to those behind-the-scenes board members who provide the expertise and guidance on which the journal depends. I am pleased to announce Speculum’s newest board members, confirmed in their positions at the MAA annual meeting in Washington, DC in February. We welcome to the Editorial Board: Noah Guynn, Samantha Herrick, Eleanor Johnson, and Ian Wei. On the Review Board we are fortunate to have Nicolino Applauso, Maud Kozody, and Sol Miguel-Prendes join us. The work of these scholars is crucial to the day-to-day functioning of the journal, not only in terms of the articles and book reviews published, but also in regard to process and policy decisions.
One recent decision made by the Editorial Board, inspired by a conversation I had with Lisa Fagin Davis, takes effect this month. I am proud to announce that in response to the ongoing assault on and censorship of CRS and LGBTQ+ studies in curricula and library collections across the US, the Editorial Board of Speculum, in collaboration with our publisher, the University of Chicago Press, is making five recent articles (and two presidential addresses) free to read on our website. While all embed themselves in the groundwork established by these areas of study, they also seek to open up fresh fields of inquiry and bring new perspectives to venerable topics, thereby immensely enriching our field of medieval studies.
As presidential addresses to the Medieval Academy of America, the articles “The Regulation of ‘Sodomy’ in the Latin East and West” by Ruth Mazo Karras (95/4 [2020]) and “Cultural Encounter, Race, and a Humanist Ideology of Empire in the Art of Trecento Venice” by Thomas E. A. Dale (98/1 [2023]) are already free to read in perpetuity on the Speculum website. Now also freely available for six months are Pamela A. Patton, “What Did Medieval Slavery Look Like? Color, Race, and Unfreedom in Later Medieval Iberia” (97/3 [2022]); Katharine Breen, “Personification and Gender Fluidity in the Psychomachia and its Early Reception” (97/4 [2022]); Anna Wilson, “Petrarch’s Queer History” (95/3 [2020]); Mohamad Ballan, “Borderland Anxieties: Lisān al-Dīn ibn al-Khatị̄b (d. 1374): the Politics of Genealogy in Late Medieval Granada” (98/2 [2023]); and forthcoming, in the July 98/3 (2023) issue: François·e Charmaille, “Trans Climates of the European Middle Ages: 500–1300.”
The collection can be found here: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/journals/spc/spc-perspectives
And finally, as we turn our attention from the hugely successful in-person Washington, DC meeting of the MAA to the hybrid ICMS (Kalamazoo) meeting later this spring, I would like to invite you to the roundtable session on Friday, 12 May at 10:00 AM: “Surveying Journals and Their Practices across Medieval and Early Modern Studies,” in which I’ll be a panelist. I look forward to seeing you there!
Now that the International Congress on Medieval Studies is back to meeting in person (May 11-13), the Medieval Academy of America will be returning to Kalamazoo as well:
1) The Friday morning plenary, sponsored by the Academy, will be delivered by Thelma Thomas (Institute of Fine Arts, New York University): “Clothing the Angelic Life: The Desert Fathers on the Necessity of Clothing for Monks, Angels, and Adam” (Friday, May 12, 8:30 AM, Bernhard Ballroom). Two related sessions organized by Prof. Thomas will take place on Thursday at 3:30 PM (Session 133, Schneider 2335, hybrid format) and Friday at 1:30 PM (Session 253, virtual format).
2) On Thursday at 1:30 and 3:30 PM, the Graduate Student Committee is sponsoring a two-part workshop on “Careers Beyond the Academy” (Sessions 81 and 131). Both sessions will take place in Schneider Hall 1330 and in hybrid format.
3) The Committee on Centers and Regional Associations (CARA) is sponsoring two roundtables: Making Medieval I: The Experiential Pedagogy of Literature and the Arts (Friday, 10 AM, Session 189, Schneider Hall 2345 (hybrid)) and Making Medieval II: The Experiential Pedagogy of Bodies and Things (Friday, 1:30 PM, Session 208, Fetzer Center 1040/1050).
4) The annual CARA Luncheon is back! The luncheon will take place on Friday May 12 at noon (Bernhard, President’s Dining Room). This annual event is a forum for sharing ideas and best practices for supporting and growing medieval studies on campus and beyond We hope you will attend as a representative of your institution, center, program, or department. There is no fee to attend, but pre-registration is required and space is limited to fifty attendees. Click here for more information and to register.
5) Finally, we invite you to visit our staffed table in the exhibit hall on Thursday or Friday to introduce yourself, transact any Medieval Academy business you may have, or pick up some chocolate to keep you going during those long afternoon sessions. As in the past, we will be giving away fifty free one-year memberships to new members, so spread the word!
See you at the ‘Zoo!
