The Georgetown University Department of Philosophy and the Ordered Universe project (https://ordered-universe.com/) will be hosting a conference at Georgetown University on March 31-April 1, 2017, and a public lecture, Modern Science, Medieval Studies and Art in Dialogue: Bishop Robert Grosseteste’s (c. 1170-1253) Scientific World of Light, Sound and the Big Bang, followed by a reception on March 31. The public is invited to attend both events.
The conference will explore the notions of understanding and feeling through the lens of Robert Grosseteste’s (c. 1170-1253) philosophical, scientific, and theological works. Grosseteste treats these notions in terms of a conception of the aspectus and affectus of the soul, a signature distinction employed throughout his career. Even so, these terms have longer histories of use and interpretation in the Middle Ages in both philosophy and spiritual contexts. The conference will be interdisciplinary in nature and feature papers from a wide range of disciplines, with international speakers, on the various themes raised by consideration of aspectus and affectus. Papers consider other uses of the terms in philosophical accounts of how the human mind works and in twelfth-century monastic writing, the inheritance from St. Augustine as used by Grosseteste in his treatise On the Liberal Arts, his collection of Dicta, and his Hexaemeron. Other fruitful avenues for exploring the implications of aspectus and affectus include medieval Arabic philosophy of science, and modern philosophy and science of perception and motivation.
For further details please visit the conference website https://ordered-universe.com/aspectus-and-affectus/ or contact the conference organizer, Prof. Neil Lewis, at lewisn@georgetown.edu.
We are thrilled to announce that Dr. Agnieszka Rec has been appointed as the first two-year postdoctoral editorial fellow at Speculum, chosen from a pool of nearly 80 impressive applicants. Dr. Rec, a historian of the later Middle Ages with a research focus in the history of alchemy and the history of the book in Central and Eastern Europe, received her PhD from Yale University in 2016 and is currently the 2016-2017 Herdegen Fellow at the Chemical Heritage Foundation in Philadelphia, PA.
Grab your passport and meet us in Toronto!
The 93rd Annual Meeting of the Medieval Academy of America will be held at Emory University (Atlanta, Georgia), 1 – 3 March 2018. The Program Committee invites proposals for papers on all topics and in all disciplines and periods of medieval studies. Any member of the Medieval Academy may submit a paper proposal; others may submit proposals as well but must become members in order to present papers at the meeting. Special consideration will be given to individuals whose field would not normally involve membership in the Medieval Academy.
As always, the Medieval Academy of America will have a strong presence at the 2017 International Congress on Medieval Studies (May 11-14).
The Graduate Student Committee offers its 2017 Mentorship Program at the three major medieval conferences. Graduate students are paired with more established scholars at the MAA Annual Meeting, ICMS Kalamazoo, and IMC Leeds.
