I am very pleased to use this President’s column to report on two new programs begun this summer. Thanks to an initiative by former President Sara Lipton, in June and July the MAA offered a set of intensive summer skills workshops. Funded by a generous anonymous donor (thank you!), the workshops were designed to support graduate students who may not have access to training they need for work on primary sources. Each noncredit course met online for five weeks: Terrence Cullen of Vassar College offered instruction in Old French; Sean Gilsdorf from Harvard taught Latin Paleography and Manuscript Studies; and Diane Warne Anderson of the University of Massachusetts, Boston taught Medieval Latin. We had 77 total applications to the workshops; 49 were accepted and 42 enrolled.
Feedback from participants was overwhelmingly positive. A few noted the need for some fine tuning in our descriptions of prerequisites and course focus, but most recorded enthusiasm for the instructors and the curricula, and several expressed particular gratitude for the accessibility of the workshops on Zoom. The workshops were originally part of the MAA’s 2025 Centennial celebration, but we hope that after review by Council and with the continued support of our donor (thank you again), they will continue in Summer 2026.
This summer also marked the launch of a webinar series funded through an ACLS grant that Lisa Fagin Davis secured for the MAA. Thanks to Lisa’s initiative, our Inclusivity and Diversity Committee is able to host a series of workshops and talks by winners of the grants and prizes awarded by that committee. Stay tuned for announcements of further events in the series.
I end by acknowledging that the new academic year brings personal, professional, and institutional uncertainty for many of us. MAA members have reported hiring freezes, cancellations of academic programs, lost grant funding, reduced or eliminated research funds and the resulting inability to pay for travel to conferences or archives, in addition to escalating and alarming attacks on academic freedom. The conditions in which we do our work are changing quickly, and our ability to preserve the viability of medieval studies – and of the humanities more broadly – may depend on the invention of new modes of collaboration and support. I confess that I don’t know what these would be, though perhaps the programs I described above could be a start. And I would be eager to hear further ideas from you.
