The Medieval Academy Blog

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. The deadline for proposals is 1 May 2020. Click here for more information.

The Medieval Academy of America congratulates the winners of the 2020 Medieval Academy Publication Prizes:

Haskins Medal: Richard F. Green. Elf Queens and Holy Friars: Fairy Beliefs and the Medieval Church (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016)

Karen Gould Prize in Art History: Benjamin Anderson. Cosmos and Community in Early Medieval Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017)

Digital Humanities and Multimedia Studies Prize: vHMML  (Columba Stewart, OSB, and Daniel Gullo, Principal Investigators).

John Nicholas Brown Prize: Steven A. Schoenig. Bonds of Wool: The Pallium and Papal Power in the Middle Ages (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2016).

Van Courtlandt Elliott Prize: Randall Todd Pippenger. “Lives on hold: the Dampierre family, captivity and the crusades in thirteenth-century Champagne,” Journal of Medieval History 44 (2018), 507-528.

Please join us for the publication prize ceremony on Saturday, 28 March, at 10:45 AM in the Martin Luther King, Jr. Student Union’s West Pauley Ballroom, University of California at Berkeley, in conjunction with the  Medieval Academy of America Annual Meeting.

We are very pleased to announce the 2020 CARA Awards:

Robert L. Kindrick-CARA Awards for Outstanding Service to Medieval Studies: Eugene Lyman (Treasurer, Medieval Academy of America) and Deborah Deliyannis (Indiana University and The Medieval Review)
CARA Awards for Excellence in Teaching: Sean Field (Univ. of Vermont) and Frank Klaassen (Univ. of Saskatchewan)

These prizes will be awarded during the CARA-MAP Plenary Session at the upcoming Medieval Academy Annual Meeting at the University of California, Berkeley on Friday, 27 March at 10:45 AM.

The annual Inclusivity and Diversity Travel Grant is awarded to a participant in the Medieval Academy’s Annual Meeting presenting on the study of diversity and inclusivity in the Middle Ages, broadly conceived. In 2020, an anonymous donation has made it possible to present two Travel Grants instead of one.

We are very pleased to announce that the 2020 Inclusivity and Diversity Travel Grants have been awarded to Tirumular Narayanan (Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison) for his paper “‘As Black as Ink’: Text-Image Mismatches in Les Grandes Chroniques de France (Royal MS 16 G VI) and to Tarrell Campbell (St. Louis Univ.) for his round-table presentation on “Celebrating Belle da Costa Greene: An Examination of Medievalists of Color within the Field”. The Travel Grants were adjudicated by the Academy’s Inclusivity and Diversity Prize Committee and will be presented during the MAA Annual Meeting’s Business Meeting in Berkeley on Friday, 27 March, at 12:45 PM.

We are very pleased to support these emerging scholars are they present their work at the 2020 Annual Meeting:

Best Student Paper:
Christopher Halsted (Univ. of Virginia), “Wounds Before Milk: Gender and Steppe Ethnography in Post-Carolingian Europe” (Session IV.9)

Travel Bursaries:
Mary Gilbert (Indiana University, Bloomington), “Multilingual Poets? Explaining Old English ‘Influence’ in the Old Icelandic Poem Vǫlundarkviða” (Session I.2)

Austin Powell (The Catholic Univ. of America), “‘In these pages you should examine well and diligently the points which you will see I made throughout’: Spiritual Direction in the Margins of Fifteenth-Century Italian Manuscripts” (Session II.8)

Eileen Morgan (Univ. of Notre Dame), “Comme s’il estoit vif: Peacocks, Natural Philosophy and the Edible Art of Altering Nature” (Session VII.3)

Andrea Pauw (Univ. of Virginia), “Prophetic Paragons in a ‘World of Others’ Words'” (Session VI.2)

Amy Conwell (Centre for Medieval Studies, Univ. of Toronto), “Pathogenesis of a ‘Posteme’: The Development of ‘Madness’ in Middle English Medical Texts” (Session V.10)

The bursaries were adjudicated by the Committee for Professional Development and will be presented during the Business Meeting on Friday 27 March at 12:45 PM.

To the Members of the Medieval Academy of America,

The Second Ballot of the 2020 Election of Fellows and Corresponding Fellows closed on Wednesday, 2 January. The results have been certified by the President of the Fellows and the Fellows Nominating Committee, and the new Fellows have been informed of their election.

I am very pleased to introduce the Fellows Class of 2020:

Fellows:
Chris Baswell
David Burr
Helen Evans
Katherine Ludwig Jansen
Adam Kosto
Daniel Lord Smail

Corresponding Fellows:
Wim Blockmans
Jean Dunbabin
Yitzhak Hen
Gabor Klaniczay
Emilie Savage-Smith
Richard Sharpe

Please join us for the induction of new Fellows during the upcoming Annual Meeting of the Medieval Academy of America. Inductions will take place on Saturday, 28 March, at 3:45 PM in Booth Auditorium at the University of California at Berkeley School of Law. The ceremony will be immediately followed by the Fellows Plenary lecture, to be delivered by Teofilo Ruiz. More information about the Annual Meeting is available here: https://www.medievalacademy.org/events/EventDetails.aspx?id=1125497

– Lisa Fagin Davis, Executive Director

A Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) award for Digitizing Hidden Special Collections and Archives was granted to Elizabeth Hebbard (Univ. of Indiana at Bloomington), Principal Investigator, “Peripheral Manuscripts: Digitizing Medieval Manuscript Collections in the Midwest.”

The following MAA members have received funding recently from the National Endowment for the Humanities:

NEH Fellowships:  Scott Bruce (Fordham Univ.), “The Lost Patriarchs Project: Recovering the Greek Fathers in the Medieval Latin Tradition”; Simon Doubleday (Hofstra Univ.), “Christian Spain before the Crusades: Power and Pragmatism in Eleventh-Century Iberia”; Anne Lester (Johns Hopkins University), “Relics, Remembrance, and Material History in the Aftermath of the Fourth Crusade”;  Maya Maskarinec (University of Southern California), “Domesticating Saints in Medieval and Early Modern Rome”; Stephen Shoemaker (Univ. of Oregon), “The Contours of Scripture at the End of Antiquity.”

NEH Cooperative Agreements and Special Projects (P&A): Columba Stewart, OSB (Project Director, Hill Museum and Manuscript Library,  St. John’s University, Collegeville), “Developing Resources for Description of Manuscripts from Understudied Christian and Islamic Traditions”

Kristina Richardson (Queens College & Graduate Center, The City University of New York) was granted an NEH Fellowship for Faculty at Hispanic-Serving Institutions, to support her project “Gypsies’ and Race-Making in the Premodern Middle East.”