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