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.

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.

We are very pleased to announce the winners of the 2018 MAA/CARA Summer Scholarships, supporting student participation in summer courses in medieval languages or manuscript studies:

Stacie Leigh Beach(University of Tennessee, Knoxville), studying epigraphy at the American Academy in Rome;

LauraLee Brott (University of Wisconsin-Madison), studying “A History of Maps and Mapping” at the London Rare Books School;

Lindsay Corbett (McGill University), studying Byzantine Greek at Bogazici University in Istanbul;

Rachel Pei Hirsch (University of Michigan), studying Mughal Persian at AISS-Lucknow, University of Göttingen;

Coral Lumbley (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), studying Welsh at Aberystwyth University;

Amanda Marie Racine (Fordham University), studying Classical Arabic at the Qasid Arabic Institute, Amman, Jordan;

Jack Christopher Wiegand (University of Toronto), studying Paleography and Codicology at the University of New Mexico.

The Schallek Awards, given in collaboration with the Richard III Society – American Branch, support graduate students conducting doctoral research in any relevant discipline dealing with late-medieval Britain (ca. 1350-1500).

A clerical error led to the notification of six Schallek Awardees this year instead of the allocated five. To allow us to fund all six, two anonymous donors have generously funded a one-time British Studies Travel Award. The Awardees are:

Michelle Brooks (University of Massachusetts, Amherst), “Poeticizing the Universe:  Scientific Discourse and Literary Absence in Chaucer’s ‘A Treatise on the Astrolabe'”

Gina Marie Hurley (Yale University), “Schryue yow openlye: Confession and Community in Middle English Literature”

Michaela Jacques (Harvard University), “The Reception and Transmission of the Medieval Welsh Bardic Grammars, 1330-1578”

Anna Kelner (Harvard University), “Remedies against Temptations: Vision, Ethics and Gender in Later Medieval England”

Charlotte Clare Whatley (University of Wisconsin, Madison), “No Time Runs Against the King: The Function of Fictions in the Late-Medieval English Common Law”

Hannah Wood (University of Toronto), “Intersections of Voluntary and Involuntary Poverty in Late Medieval England”

The Medieval Academy supports conference travel for unaffiliated or contingent scholars through our Travel Grant program, funded by donations to the Medieval Academy of America Travel Fund. We are very pleased to support conference travel for these recent awardees:

Kyle Cooper Lincoln (Kalamazoo, MI), “About three clerics: Miguel of San Nicolas de Toledo, Gil of Cuenca, and Lanfranco of Palencia,” V Simposio Internacional de Estudios Medievales (Santiago, Chile, 3-5 October, 2018);

J. James Lee (Davis, CA), “How French Monks Instructed Spanish Monks to Pronounce ‘e’,” 13th International Colloquium on Late and Vulgar Latin (Budapest, Hungary, September 3-7, 2018);

Kathryn Green (Louisville, KY), “‘Wiggryre Wifes’: Female Voices in Old English Heroic Poetry,” Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association (Cheyenne, WY, October 2-4, 2018).

For more information on the Travel Grant program or to apply, click here.

We are very pleased to announce  that the 2018 Medieval Academy Publication Subvention has been awarded to Rena Lauer (Oregon State University) to support the publication of her forthcoming monograph, Colonial Justice and the Jews of Venetian Crete (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press).

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. For more information, click here. For a full list of subvented books, click here.

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.

What’s happening on campus? The Committee on Centers and Regional Associations (CARA) wants to know!

Please send a report about this year’s medieval studies programming in your department, regional association, or center to the Medieval Academy of America. We will publish your update on the Medieval Academy News website (http://TheMedievalAcademyBlog.org), our hub for updates, calls for papers, and announcements. All submissions will be tagged as CARA news and will be retrievable as a group using this URL:

https://www.themedievalacademyblog.org/category/cara/

By distributing that URL widely through social media, the MAA newsletter, email, etc., we will easily be able to promote your program to the Academy’s 3,700 members and more than 11,000 Twitter-followers.

To submit your update, please follow these instructions:

1) Send your report in the body of an email message. You may include as many links as you wish (full URLs please, not embedded). If you have your own newsletter published online, please include that link as well.

2) Do not attach files or images to your email message.

3) Both the subject and the first line of your email should read: CARA News: <name of your institution/program/center/association>. For example, “CARA News: The Medieval Academy of America”

4) Send your update to: info@themedievalacademy.org

For more information about CARA, please see our website: https://medievalacademy.site-ym.com/?page=CARA

Thank you!
Anne Lester, CARA Chair

Amiri Ayanna (Brown University) and Melissa Reynolds (Rutgers Univ.-New Brunswick) have each been awarded an ACLS/Mellon Dissertation Completion Fellowship.

If you have good news to share, please contact Executive Director Lisa Fagin Davis (LFD@themedievalacademy.org)