The Medieval Academy Blog

The 94th Annual Meeting of the Medieval Academy of America will take place in Philadelphia on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania, from 7-9 March 2019. The meeting is jointly hosted by the Medieval Academy of America, Bryn Mawr College, Delaware Valley Medieval Association, Haverford College, St. Joseph’s University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Villanova University.

The Global Turn in Medieval Studies: Medievalists across various disciplines are taking a more geographically and methodologically global approach to the study of the Middle Ages. While the Organizing Committee invites proposals for papers on all topics and in all disciplines and periods of medieval studies, this year’s conference spotlights the “global turn” in medieval studies. To this end, we encourage session and paper proposals that treat the Middle Ages as a broad historical and cultural phenomenon, encompassing the full extent of Europe as well as the Middle East, southern and eastern Asia, Africa, and beyond.  We also invite proposals that explore departures from traditional teleological discourses rooted in national interests, ones that apply disciplinary and interdisciplinary methods to study a broad array of subjects.

The full  call for papers is available here.

We are now accepting applications for this digital humanities workshop co-sponsored by The Medieval Academy of America and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Co-taught by Benjamin Albritton (Computing Info Systems Analyst, Stanford University Libraries) and Lisa Fagin Davis (Executive Director, Medieval Academy of America), the workshop will take place at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University from 10-12 July 2018.

So much of the work currently being undertaken by medievalists is dependent on primary resources that may not be close at hand, and digital imagery alone can only take us so far. We have limited storage space for the enormous images we want to work with, and so we need to work in an online environment. In keeping with digital best-practices, we want to avoid siloing of files in sealed-off digital repositories. We need to make these images, and our work, discoverable, and so we need consistent metadata and annotation tools. We want to work with open data, including our own, data that can be shared, downloaded, manipulated, visualized, and mined. As scholars, we have limited funding and technical support, and so we need tools that are free, open-access, and easily implemented. The combination of the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) and a shared-canvas viewer such as Mirador opens new avenues for researchers and students to discover, access, compare, annotate, and share images of and data pertaining to artifacts and manuscripts. Cloud-based, flexible, open-access, and easily implementable, IIIF and Mirador are a particularly powerful combination.

Participants in this three-day intensive workshop will have the opportunity to learn about the International Image Interoperability Framework and Mirador, and learn how this technology can facilitate new methodologies in manuscript and art history research. Working with their own images, participants will 1) upload their images into a IIIF server (if they aren’t already served by a IIIF-compliant platform); 2) work with the instructors to develop annotations and tags in keeping with their research project; 3) save the annotation layers for future use.

Click here for more information and to apply. Applications must be received by June 1.

The Medieval Academy of America seeks to appoint an Editor for Speculum.  The position is configured as part-time, requiring around 25 hours per week. The Editor is appointed for an expected five-year term, subject to acceptable yearly performance reviews, with the possibility of a second five-year term by mutual agreement. The editor should be an established scholar with academic credentials in some field(s) of medieval studies, broadly defined, with good organizational and decision-making skills. Experience in journal or book editing will be helpful but not necessary. The new editor should plan on taking office in the late Spring of 2019, and at the latest by July 1, 2019. Terms and conditions are to be negotiated, as is the physical location of the Editor.

Applications should be sent to the MAA by July 30, 2018. There will be electronic interviews in Fall 2018 and interviews with finalists in early December, 2018. Cover letters may be addressed to MAA President David Wallace, Chair of the Search Committee. In addition to a curriculum vitae, the cover letter should include ideas about future directions for the journal, and discussion of how s/he envisions setting up the position, either in the MAA office, now in Cambridge, MA, or by moving the operation to a university campus. If the latter, s/he will describe possible institutional support. The search committee wants to identify the best pool of candidates, and the MAA is willing to be flexible in finding ways to accommodate the various modes of professional life encountered in the searching process. However, wherever the ultimate location of the Editor, there will need to be access to a major research library and to graduate students who can be hired for assistance. Candidates should also include the names and email addresses of three scholars who can speak to the candidate’s editorial experience and scholarship; these references will only be contacted for long-listed candidates. The MAA President would be happy to respond to immediate questions about the duties involved, but candidates should also consult the fuller description of duties posted on the Academy website. The MAA also encourages nominations for the position, and there is a place to submit these on the website as well; all nominees will be sent a letter encouraging application.

For additional information, contact:
EditorSearch@TheMedievalAcademy.org

Click here for a full job description and to apply.

Click here to submit a nomination.

The Medieval Academy of America is very pleased to announce the establishment of the Belle Da Costa Greene Fund.

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 had to pass 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 will be 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.

The Medieval Academy of America is pleased to announce a collaboration with the Digital Latin Library (DLL). This partnership demonstrates the Academy’s support of DLL’s open-access publishing model – in which text, apparatus, and image are made interoperable – and is in keeping with the Medieval Academy of America’s long-standing commitment to high-quality Latin editions. We offer this online platform in addition to our ongoing printed series Medieval Academy Books. The Medieval Academy of America will oversee the vetting and approval of DLL editions of medieval Latin texts, while the Digital Latin Library will facilitate XML encoding and online hosting. Vetted online editions will carry the imprimatur of the Medieval Academy of America and should be considered of equal status to similarly-vetted printed editions in application, promotion, or tenure dossiers.

The MAA’s Digital Humanities and Multimedia Studies Committee has established procedures and policies for the vetting and approval of DLL editions of medieval Latin texts, and we welcome the submission of pre-proposals. For information and guidelines, please visit our website or contact the MAA Executive Director.

Michelle Warren (Dartmouth College) has been awarded a Guggenheim Felowship as well as an ACLS Fellowship to support the completion of her book Lives of a Medieval Book in the Digital Dark Ages, which traces the history of a manuscript from the Middle Ages to the present.

ACLS Fellowships have also been awarded to Jonathan P. Decter (Brandeis University) for his project “The Jewish Discovery of Religion in the Medieval Middle East,” and to Emily Zazulia (University of California, Berkeley) for her project “Where Sight Meets Sound: The Poetics of Late Medieval Music Writing.”

The National Endowment for Humanities has awarded grants to Rebecca Wollenberg (Independent Scholar) for her project “Beyond the Book: Reimagining the Early Reception History of the Bible” and to Virginia Blanton (University of Missouri, Kansas City) for her project “Shaping Monastic Devotional Culture in 14th-Century England.”

If you have good news to share, please contact the MAA Executive Director.

It has been five years since I took on the role of Executive Director of the Medieval Academy of America (including one year as Acting ED). In those five years, thanks to your generosity, we have increased our support of members to record levels. In 2017, we awarded a total of nearly $100,000 to forty student, contingent, junior, and independent scholars. We facilitated the dissertation research of sixteen advanced graduate students, sent ten students to summer language and paleography programs around the world, supported fourteen independent and contingent scholars with research or conference-travel funding, subvented the publication of several first books, and helped fund student conferences and symposia.

We continue to push the chronological, geographic, and topical boundaries of Medieval Studies. We promote a broad, global definition of the field in the pages of Speculum, in the work we support with research and travel grants, in the publications we honor, and in the papers presented at our Annual Meeting. It has become clear, however, that our mandate must also include advocating for you – a member of the Medieval Academy of America – in more personal ways. The painful events of the past year, in particular, have made it clear that we must support you not only as a scholar but as a human being trying to make a living as a medievalist. This part of our work is guided in principal by our Values Statement and in practice by these four directives:

Pull down the walls that keep us from engaging in the world outside Academia;

Open the Gates and welcome all medievalists;

Build a longer table and invite everyone to have a seat;

Raise a bigger tent to protect those whose lives, bodies, and research carry professional, economic, intellectual, or personal risk.

Inspired by recommendations made by the Fellowship of Medievalists of Color and in an effort spearheaded by Nahir Otaño Gracia (Beloit College), the Council of the Medieval Academy recently approved several initiatives designed to make the Academy a more welcoming place for all medievalists: the establishment of an Inclusivity and Diversity Committee to chart our course, and the approval of two awards to be adjudicated by the newly-established Inclusivity and Diversity Prize Committee. The two new awards will be granted annually beginning in 2019: the Inclusivity and Diversity Travel Grant, to be presented annually to a medievalist presenting a paper at our Annual Meeting; and the Belle Da Costa Greene Award, to be granted annually to a member of the Medieval Academy of America to support research and travel. Please consider donating to the Belle Da Costa Greene Fund in support of the Award to be given in her name.

We are extremely grateful to Dr. Gracia for her efforts in bringing these programs to fruition and also for her role in planning and chairing the Inclusivity and Diversity roundtable at our recent Annual Meeting in Atlanta. She has written eloquently about the session in a recent blogpost. Other sessions and papers at the Annual Meeting addressed some of the issues and ideas raised in the roundtable, and we will continue to engage with these topics at future Annual Meetings.

These initiatives add to programming already underway. We took part in several wide-reaching public advocacy actions in 2017, such as the statement we released after the horrors in Charlottesville or the actions we took when NEH funding was at risk. Such actions are undertaken by the Council in compliance with our Advocacy Policy. Under the leadership of 2nd Vice-President Ruth Mazo Karras, an ad hoc committee has begun to develop policies and procedures having to do with identifying, addressing, and preventing harassment at our Annual Meeting.

I invite you to help us understand where we need to focus our efforts by participating in our survey of gender- and racial-identity demographics. To participate, sign into your account on our website, click “Manage Profile” and “Edit bio,” and check the appropriate boxes. This information is absolutely and inviolably confidential and will not be visible on your public profile. It will be accessed and used only in aggregate. We need as many of our 3,600 members as possible to contribute this data so that we can accurately assess the composition and complexity of our membership corps.

Thank you for supporting these initiatives with your continued membership, volunteer efforts, and generous contributions. I look forward to working with you as we continue our efforts to make the Medieval Academy of America a more welcoming place for all medievalists.

Working and learning together, we can build a better Medieval Studies.

Lisa Fagin Davis
Executive Director, Medieval Academy of America
LFD@TheMedievalAcademy.org