The Medieval Academy Blog

To the Members of the Medieval Academy:

As threats to the Humanities continue to disrupt our colleagues’ teaching, research, and livelihoods, your support of the Medieval Academy of America means more than ever.

As we come to the end of our Centennial year and you consider end-of-year charitable giving, we hope you will include the Medieval Academy of America in your plans. The MAA has responded to the challenges so many of our community members have faced this past year by increasing scholarship support, offering a set of subsidized summer skills courses for graduate students, continuing our successful summer mentoring program, and adding a new book prize, all while advancing our mission of publishing the most thoughtful and innovative scholarship in medieval studies. This critical work depends on contributions from members.

This year’s Centennial was a singular celebration of our community. The Annual Meeting brought together more than 850 medievalists from around the world. Through our Centennial Grants, we supported two dozen innovative projects across the North America. The January issue of Speculum looked back at where we’ve been, and the 100th volume of Speculum will debut next month with the publication of Speculations, a collection of dozens of essays considering the future of our field. 

Your year-end donation will help us to continue and expand programming in 2026 and beyond. A donation to our Travel or Mentoring funds enables us to continue and even expand support for students, early-, and mid-career scholars. Donations to the MAA’s endowment contribute to the future of the organization and its programs; funding for operations helps to implement all of our programs. 

Please consider making a donation so we can continue to strengthen medieval studies and support its scholars in North America and around the world. 

Thank you in advance for whatever support you can offer. We look forward to working with you in 2026 as we celebrate the centennial of Speculum!

Peggy McCracken, President

Lisa Fagin Davis, Executive Director

The 101st annual Meeting of the Medieval Academy of America will take place on March 19–21, 2026 on the campuses of the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Amherst College, and will also include events at Mt. Holyoke College and Smith College. Hosted by the Five College Consortium, the theme of the meeting is “Consortiums and Confluences.” The program will bring together scholars from a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds addressing the medieval world and critical topics in Medieval Studies. Our plenary lectures will be given by Elly Truitt (Associate Professor of History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania), Peggy McCracken (President of the Medieval Academy of America and Professor of French, Women’s Studies, and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan), and Jesús Rodríguez-Velasco (Augustus R. Street Professor of Spanish & Portuguese and Comparative Literature at Yale University). We are excited to welcome you to Amherst, MA, and its environs, and look forward to meeting you, learning from you, and celebrating our shared commitment to Medieval Studies. Watch this space for program and registration information in the coming months: 
https://maa2026.wordpress.amherst.edu/

Rebekkah Hart has been named the incoming 2026 Schallek Fellow. During the tenure of her fellowship, she will be working on Chapter 2 of her dissertation entitled “The Kiss of Peace: Materialities and Afterlives of Liturgical Paxes, or ‘Kissing Images,’ in Late Medieval England (c. 1250-1550).” While the “Kiss of Peace” was a common liturgical ritual in the Christian mass from at least the second century, this ritual became materially embodied around 1250 in the form of the “pax” object, first recorded in England. A pax (Latin for “peace”) is a small object that generally features a Christological, Marian, or hagiographic image, which the celebrant used to present to another person to kiss. Every church had at least one pax, as they were a central component of the mass. Thus, they survive today in significant numbers across museums and collections, and contain vast potential for understanding how medieval worshippers physically interacted with sacred and religious images. Yet, paxes remain chronically understudied. Their wide-ranging visual and material forms complicate identification, and their censure at the Reformation further obscured their original contexts. An entire class of objects has fallen through the cracks. This dissertation will be the first large-scale English-language study of paxes to rectify this oversight and mine these objects for what they can tell us about image veneration, sensorial functions, and the lived bodily experiences of worship in late medieval England.

Rebekkah Hart is a PhD candidate studying late medieval art with Professor Elina Gertsman. She is currently a curatorial intern at the J. Paul Getty Museum in the Sculpture and Decorative Arts Department during the 2025-2026 academic year. Her research interests include the role of sensorial reception, performativity, and materiality in late medieval devotional imagery. First and foremost, Rebekkah is fascinated by objects. Forthcoming publications investigate the curative consumption of medieval alabaster sculpture and the theological implications of transparent materials and oil paint in early Netherlandish painting.

“Trans Studies as Book Historical Method”
JD Sargan
December 5, 2025, 12pm-1pm (EDT)

Archival collections are political spaces: the decisions that govern whose histories are preserved, when, and by whom are not neutral. They reflect the communities that make them. For most of western history queer, trans, and gender non-conforming people were excluded from such communities. As a result, the experiences of premodern gender-divergent people went largely unreported and reconstructing such histories relies on the piecing together of ephemeral glimpses. Tackling these limitations requires generative modes of reading through the archive to seek out trans lives beyond the trace. Literary scholars have developed tactics and tools to read through such traces, but how do we move beyond the limits of the trace to uncover a more expansive history of premodern gender non-conformity?

Click here to Register.

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How to Talk to Your Dean
Moderated by CARA Board Member Christina Christoforatou
Thursday, 1/15, 6pm EST, on Zoom

So many of us who are working to advocate for Medieval Studies in universities today are trying to better understand our academic administrators. How can we advocate for our programs in an age that seems to increasingly devalue the humanities and premodern studies?

Join us for this special CARA zoom session when we will get the inside scoop thanks to this panel of medievalist-deans: Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Dean of the Humanities, Arizona State University), Craig Nakashian (Dean of the Honors College, Texas A&M University), and Lawrence Poos (Former Dean, School of Arts and Sciences, Catholic University of America).

If you want to know how to pitch your medieval curriculum, or advocate for a Medieval Studies program faculty line, or write a conference funding application, join us on Thursday, January 15th at 6pm EST. Moderated by CARA board member Christina Christoforatou Konstantinis (Baruch College, CUNY). To better streamline our conversation, please send any questions you might have for our panel of deans by Wednesday, 1/7/26 (email them to laurenmancia@brooklyn.cuny.edu).

Click here to register.

The Medieval Academy of America invites applications for the following grants. Please note that applicants must be members in good standing in order to be eligible for Medieval Academy awards.

The Inclusivity and Diversity Research Grant

The Inclusivity and Diversity Research Grant of up to $3,000 will be granted annually to a scholar, at any stage in their career, who seeks to pursue innovative research that will broaden the scope of medieval studies. Projects that focus on non-European regions or topics under the Inclusivity and Diversity Committee’s purview such as race, class, disability, gender, religion, or sexuality are particularly welcomed. The grant prioritizes applicants who are students, ECRs, or non-tenured. Click here for more information. (Deadline 31 December 2026)

Belle Da Costa Greene Award

The Belle Da Costa Greene Award of $2,000 will be granted annually for research and travel. The award may be used to visit archives, attend conferences, or to facilitate writing and research. The award will be granted on the basis of the quality of the proposed project, the applicant’s budgetary needs (as expressed by a submitted budget and in the project narrative), and the estimation of the ways in which the award will facilitate the applicant’s research and contribute to the field. Special consideration will be given to graduate students, emerging junior scholars, adjunct, and unaffiliated scholars. Click here for more information. (Deadline 15 February 2026)

Olivia Remie Constable Award

Four Olivia Remie Constable Awards of $1,500 each will be granted to emerging junior faculty, adjunct or unaffiliated scholars (broadly understood: post-doctoral, pre-tenure) for research and travel. Click here for more information. (Deadline 15 February 2026)

MAA Dissertation Grants:

The nine annual Medieval Academy Dissertation Grants support advanced graduate students who are writing Ph.D. dissertations on medieval topics. The $2,000 grants help defray research expenses. Click here for more information. (Deadline 15 February 2026)

Schallek Awards

The five annual Schallek awards support graduate students conducting doctoral research in any relevant discipline dealing with late-medieval Britain (ca. 1350-1500). The $5,000 awards help defray research expenses. Click here for more information. (Deadline 15 February 2026)

MAA/GSC Grant for Innovation in Community-Building and Professionalization

The MAA/GSC Grant(s) will be awarded to an individual or graduate student group from one or more universities. The purpose of this grant is to stimulate new and innovative efforts that support pre-professionalization, encourage communication and collaboration across diverse groups of graduate students, and build communities amongst graduate student medievalists. Click here for more information. (Deadline 15 February 2026)

Please contact the Executive Director for more information about these and other MAA programs.

The Medieval Academy’s Boston office will be closed from Tuesday 23 December 2025 through Friday 2 January 2026. We look forward to working with you in 2026.