The Medieval Academy Blog

The Medieval Academy of America had a strong presence at the International Medieval Congress at Leeds this year, with a contingent that included President Ruth Mazo Karras, several Councilors, the Executive Director, and, as always, several dozen MAA members. Our plenarist, Aden Kumler (Univ. of Chicago), delivered a brilliant and well-attended lecture on Tuesday night that drew on the Congress theme “Materiality” and left the audience with much to discuss and ponder. The lecture was followed by a convivial reception. Join us next year, when our plenarist will be Carol Symes (The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign).

GSC @Leeds:

The Graduate Student Committee of the MAA helped make professional development inside and outside of academia for graduate students and early career scholars a central discussion at Leeds this year. The Mentoring Program was a success with thirty-three pairings of graduate student and early career mentees with more senior mentors. Meanwhile, the GSC organized a lively round table discussion titled “How to Sell your Post-Graduate Degree in Medieval Studies Outside the Tenure Track Job Market” which nearly thirty graduate student and early career scholars attended. On the evening of July 2nd, the GSC hosted a reception at the university Old Bar where graduate students and early career scholars were able to meet and mingle as they enjoyed watching the U.S. v. England Women’s Wold Cup semifinal together.

The 2nd Annual Medieval Academy of America Digital Humanities Workshop, co-sponsored by the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, took place in New Haven from July 9-11. The “Interoperability and Medieval Manuscripts” seminar was led by Benjamin Albritton (Stanford University) and MAA Executive Director Lisa Fagin Davis. The workshop focused on working with IIIF-compliant images in a shared-canvas workspace. Participants learned how to use new open-access tools to make images interoperable, create their own shared-canvas workspaces, load their images, set up and use a local annotation server, and engage with their images by using digitally-sustainable methodologies to facilitate image comparison, annotation, tagging, and manipulation. The fifteen participants came from all over North America and ranged from undergraduate and graduate students to librarians, unaffiliated scholars, junior and senior faculty. All non-local participants received travel bursaries generously provided by the Beinecke Library.

For more details about the workshop, search #MirMed2019 on Twitter or click here.

Members of the MAA are hereby invited to submit nominations for the election of Fellows and Corresponding Fellows of the Medieval Academy of America for 2020.

The title of Fellow was created in 1926 to recognize and honor those scholars among us who over the years have made outstanding contributions to Medieval Studies through their teaching, scholarship, and service. These are normally senior scholars with an outstanding record of accomplishments, and ideally with work that manifests interdisciplinary interests.

Nominations are encouraged in all the varied fields encompassed by Medieval Studies. The nomination itself should be written in ways to make the nominee’s contributions to the field intelligible to a multi-disciplinary body of Fellows. All members of the Medieval Academy are free to submit nominations.

The nominations are overseen by the Fellows Nominating Committee, which is empowered to intervene only if there is some notable inequity in the list of proposed nominees. Existing Fellows will cast their ballots in December and January. The election of 2020 will operate under the by-laws and procedures adopted in 2013 and revised in 2015.

Existing Fellows may also have chosen to become Emeriti or Emeritae Fellows, which has the effect of opening up additional slots the following year for the election of new Fellows. Such Emeriti/Emeritae Fellows retain the position of Fellow in every respect but relinquish their right to vote in the election of new Fellows.

Current bylaws prescribe that there may be a total of up to 125 Fellows who at the time of election are members of the Academy and residents of North America, and in addition up to 75 Corresponding Fellows who at the time of election are residents of countries outside of North America. Following the rules established by the current bylaws, six (6) slots are available for the year 2020, for which there must be at least twelve (12) nominations. For the nomination of Corresponding Fellows no established minimum number of nominations is required.

Instructions for submitting nominations are available here: https://medievalacademy.site-ym.com/?page=Election_Procedure

Please refer to the lists of current Fellows before proposing a nomination:

Current Fellows: https://medievalacademy.site-ym.com/?page=Fellows_List

Current Corresponding Fellows: https://medievalacademy.site-ym.com/page/CorrFellows

Nominations may be submitted by email (as a PDF attachment) to the Executive Director at <LFD@TheMedievalAcademy.org> or by mail to:

Lisa Fagin Davis, Executive Director
Medieval Academy of America
6 Beacon St., Suite 500
Boston, Mass. 02108

Nominations for the 2020 elections must be received by 15 October 2019. Unsuccessful nominations from previous years may be resubmitted. Please contact the Executive Director for further information.

Finally, please note that nominations are to be kept in strictest confidence, from the nominee as well as from others.

– John Van Engen, President of the Fellows

Photo: The Haskins Medal. The Medieval Academy of America

The Medieval Academy of America invites submissions for the following prizes to be awarded at the 2020 MAA Annual Meeting (University of California, Berkeley, 26-28 March). Submission instructions vary, but all dossiers must complete by 15 October 2019.

Haskins Medal
Awarded to a distinguished monograph in the field of medieval studies.

Digital Humanities Prize
Awarded to an outstanding digital research project or resource in the field of medieval studies.

Karen Gould Prize
Awarded to a monograph of outstanding quality in medieval art history.

John Nicholas Brown Prize
Awarded to a first monograph of outstanding quality in the field of medieval studies.

Van Courtlandt Elliott Prize
Awarded to a first article of outstanding quality in the field of medieval studies.

The Medieval Academy of America invites applications for the following grants. Please note that applicants must be members in good standing as of September 15 in order to be eligible for Medieval Academy awards.

Schallek Fellowship
The Schallek Fellowship provides a one-year grant of $30,000 to support Ph.D. dissertation research in any relevant discipline dealing with late-medieval Britain (ca. 1350-1500). (Deadline 15 October 2019)

Baldwin Fellowship 
The Birgit Baldwin Fellowship provides a grant of $20,000 to support a graduate student in a North American university who is researching and writing a dissertation for the Ph.D. on any subject in French medieval history that can be realized only by sustained research in the archives and libraries of France. It may be renewed for a second year upon demonstration of satisfactory progress. (Deadline 15 November 2019)

Travel Grants 
The Medieval Academy provides travel grants to help Academy members who hold doctorates but are not in full-time faculty positions, or are contingent faculty without access to institutional funding, attend conferences to present their work. (Deadline 1 November 2019 for meetings to be held between 16 February and 31 August 2020)

MAA/CARA Conference Grant 
The MAA/CARA Conference Grant for Regional Associations and Programs awards $1,000 to help support a regional or consortial conference taking place in 2020. (Deadline 15 October 2019)

Kindrick-CARA Award for Outstanding Service to Medieval Studies 
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.

CARA Award for Excellence in Teaching  
The CARA Award for Excellence in Teaching Medieval Studies recognizes Medieval Academy members who are outstanding teachers and 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 CARA Awards will be presented at the 2020 MAA Annual Meeting (UC Berkeley, 26-28 March). Nominations and supporting materials must be received by Nov. 15.

The Belle Da Costa Greene Fund, established in 2018, has raised more than $28,000 since its inception. We need your help to reach our goal of $45,000 in order to permanently endow the annual Belle Da Costa Greene Award.

Belle Da Costa Greene (1883-1950) was a prominent art historian and the first manuscript librarian of the Pierpont Morgan collection. She was also the first known person of color and second woman to be elected a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America (1939). According to the Morgan Library & Museum website, “Greene was barely twenty when Morgan hired her, yet her intelligence, passion, and self-confidence eclipsed her relative inexperience, [and] she managed to help build one of America’s greatest private libraries.” She was, just as importantly, a black woman who passed as white in order to gain entrance and acceptance into the racially fraught professional landscape of early twentieth-century New York. Her legacy highlights the professional difficulties faced by medievalists of color, the personal sacrifices they make in order to belong to the field, and their extraordinary contributions to Medieval Studies.

The Belle Da Costa Greene Award of $2,000 is granted annually to a member of the Medieval Academy of America for research and travel. This is one of several incipient actions designed to make the Medieval Academy of America a more welcoming place for all medievalists.

Click here to donate to the Belle Da Costa Greene Fund.