The Medieval Academy Blog

A Speculum Webinar: Meet the Editors
26 March 2021 from 12:00-1:30 PM EDT via Zoom

Aimed particularly at early career scholars, this webinar brings together the editors of Speculum, along with members of the Editorial and Review Boards, to demystify the process of publishing an article or book review in the journal. We will take you step-by-step through the process. Panelists will make brief presentations to be followed by a Q&A session. The webinar, held via Zoom, is free and open to the public, though registration is required.

Click here to register.

While 2020 has brought numerous challenges to scholarship, the year has also afforded unprecedented digital access to conferences and presentations worldwide. Lectures are now accessible online that we might never have been able to attend previously. Moreover, many of these lectures remain available and can be viewed long after the fact or consulted again at a later date. The Medieval Academy of America has created a Webinar Registry where you can share your conference presentations or invited lectures as well as browse those of other medievalists, whether MAA members or not. The searchable resource will be made public in January 2021. Click here to learn more about the MAA’s Medieval Studies Webinar Registry and to participate in this initiative.

Registration for the 96th Annual Meeting of the Medieval Academy of America is now open.

The meeting is hosted by Indiana University, Bloomington, and will take place entirely online, from 15-18 April 2021. The program and registration information are available here. Register by March 10 to take advantage of the early-bird discount; please note that we will not be able to accept any registrations after March 25, because we need to enter information into the online conference platform. Please register on time!

We wish we could welcome you in person to Bloomington, but we look forward to an interesting and exciting conference!

Please email any questions to maa2021@indiana.edu.

The 97th Annual Meeting of the Medieval Academy of America will take place on the campus of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. The meeting is jointly hosted by the Medieval Academy of America and the Program in Medieval Studies at the University of Virginia, with the generous support and collaboration of colleagues from Virginia Tech, the College of William & Mary, and Washington and Lee University. The conference program will feature a diverse range of sessions highlighting innovative scholarship across the many disciplines contributing to medieval studies.

The Program Committee invites proposals for papers on all topics and in all disciplines and periods of medieval studies and medievalism studies. Any member of the Medieval Academy may submit a paper proposal; others may submit proposals as well but must become members in order to present papers at the meeting. Special consideration will be given to individuals whose field would not normally involve membership in the Medieval Academy. We are particularly interested in receiving submissions from those working outside of traditional academic positions, including independent scholars, emeritus or adjunct faculty, university administrators, those working in academic-adjacent institutions (libraries, archives, museums, scholarly societies, or cultural research centers), editors and publishers, and other fellow medievalists.

Plenary addresses will be delivered by Roland Betancourt, Professor of Art History, University of California, Irvine; Seeta Chaganti, Professor of English, University of California, Davis; and Thomas E. A. Dale, Professor of Art History, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and incoming president of the Academy.

Click here for the full Call for Papers

Deadline 15 February:
Belle Da Costa Greene Award (deadline 15 February)
The Belle Da Costa Greene Award of $2,000 will be granted annually to a medievalist of color 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. Click here to make a donation in support of the Greene Award.

Olivia Remie Constable Award (deadline 15 February):
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.

MAA Dissertation Grants (deadline 15 February):
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.

Schallek Awards (deadline 15 February):
The five annual Schallek awards support graduate students conducting doctoral research in any relevant discipline dealing with late-medieval Britain (ca. 1350-1500). The $2,000 awards help defray research expenses. Click here for more information.

MAA/GSC Grant for Innovation in Community-Building and Professionalization (deadline 15 February):
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.

Applicants for these and other MAA programs must be members in good standing of the Medieval Academy. Please contact the Executive Director for more information about these and other MAA programs.

The Medieval Academy Book Subvention Program provides grants of up to $2,500 to university or other non-profit scholarly presses to support the publication of first books by Medieval Academy members. Click here for more information.

NEW: The Medieval Academy Inclusivity and Diversity Book Subvention Program provides subventions of up to $5,000 to university or other non-profit scholarly presses to support the publication of books concerning the study of inclusivity and diversity in the Middle Ages (broadly conceived) by Medieval Academy members. Click here for more information.

Applications for subventions will be accepted only from the publisher and only for books that have already been approved for publication. Eligible Academy members who wish to have their books considered for a subvention should ask their publishers to apply directly to the Academy, following the guidelines outlined on the relevant webpage. The deadline for proposals is 1 May 2021.

Photo: The Haskins Medal. The Medieval Academy of America

The Medieval Academy of America congratulates the winners of the 2021 Medieval Academy of America Publication Prizes:

Haskins Medal: Robert G. Ousterhout, Eastern Medieval Architecture: The Building Traditions of Byzantium and Neighboring Lands (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2019)

Karen Gould Prize in Art History: Margaret Graves, Arts of Allusion: Object, Ornament, and Architecture in Medieval Islam (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2018)

Digital Humanities and Multimedia Studies Prize: Virtual Angkor (https://www.virtualangkor.com) (Principal Investigators: Adam Clulow and Tom Chandler)

John Nicholas Brown Prize: David Shyovitz, A Remembrance of His Wonders: Nature and the Supernatural in Medieval Ashkenaz (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017)

INAUGURAL Article Prize in Critical Race Studies: Shokoofeh Rajabzadeh, “The Depoliticized Saracen and Muslim Erasure” in Literature Compass, Special Issue: Critical Race and the Middle Ages, September-October 2019 (https://doi.org/10.1111/lic3.12548)

Van Courtlandt Elliott Prize: Esther Liberman Cuenca, “Town clerks and the authorship of custumals in medieval England,” Urban History 46:2 (2019): 180-201; and Noah Blan, “Charlemagne’s peaches: a case of early medieval European ecological adaptation,” Early Medieval Europe 27:4 (2019): 521-545

These Prizes will be presented at the upcoming Annual Meeting of the Medieval Academy of America, hosted online by Indiana University, Bloomington. The presentation of the Prizes and the reading of citations will take place preceding the Presidential Address on Friday, 17 April, at 4:30 PM Eastern. We hope you will join us as we honor these scholars and acknowledge their important work. Information about the Annual Meeting may be found here: https://maa2021.indiana.edu/

We are very pleased to announce the 2021 MAA Committee on Centers and Regional Associations (CARA) Awards:

The Robert L. Kindrick–CARA Award for Outstanding Service to Medieval Studies  recognizes Medieval Academy members who have provided leadership in developing, organizing, promoting, and sponsoring medieval studies through the extensive administrative work that is so crucial to the health of medieval studies but that often goes unrecognized by the profession at large. The 2021 Kindrick-CARA Award honors Axel Muller (International Medieval Congress, University of Leeds).

The CARA Award for Excellence in Teaching Medieval Studies recognizes Medieval Academy members who are outstanding teachers who have contributed to the profession by inspiring students at the undergraduate or graduate levels or by creating innovative and influential textbooks or other materials for teaching medieval subjects. The 2021 CARA Awards for Excellence in Teaching honor Christina Carlson (Iona College) and Geraldine Heng (University of Texas, Austin).

These prizes will be awarded during the April 16 virtual Business Meeting at the upcoming Medieval Academy of America Annual Meeting. Please join us as we honor these medievalists for their service and teaching.

The following Medieval Academy members have recently been awarded Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities:

Dyan Elliott, Northwestern University, “The Medieval Church and the Exhumation of Christians” (research and writing leading to a book on how medieval Christians treated the dead to signify posthumous reward or punishment).

Lisa Bitel, University of Southern California, “Unseen: The Religious Supernatural in the Earliest Middle Ages” (research and writing leading to a book on religious conversion to Christianity in early medieval Britain and Ireland).

Congratulations! If you have good news to share, please send it to Executive Director Lisa Fagin Davis.