The Medieval Academy Blog

MAA News – CARA Prize Announcements

Posted on February 15, 2017 by Chris

The 2017 Robert L. Kindrick-CARA Award for Outstanding Service to Medieval Studies is being awarded to John Van Engen, Andrew V. Tackes Professor of Medieval History at the University of Notre Dame. This award recognizes John’s multifaceted contributions to the field of Medieval Studies through his service in transforming and expanding The Medieval Institute at Notre Dame and the ripple effect his work has had throughout our profession. Through his many initiatives he has truly demonstrated the vibrancy of our field; a vibrancy, that John Van Engen has directed with intellectual generosity, vision, and unwavering commitment.

The 2017 CARA Award for Excellence in Teaching Medieval Studies is being awarded to two outstanding educators, Professor Roberta Frank and Professor Amy Livingstone. These teaching awards recognize excellence in the wide variety of teaching that medieval scholars practice, from formal classroom teaching in a college or university setting, to in-depth seminars and graduate mentoring, to online teaching, summer institutes, and academic publications devoted to the pedagogy of medieval studies.

Roberta Frank is the Marie Borroff Professor of English at Yale University. In her fifty years of teaching she has “advised or co-advised over thirty dissertations, sagely mentored students in her field and beyond, modeled generous academic citizenship, and inspired countless undergraduates with her keen critical mind, poetic sensibility, and sly wit.” “Humor and Wisdom” “accessible and generous” “authentic and encouraging” and at the center of “a community of scholars”; such phrases resound throughout Roberta’s letter of nomination. Roberta’s reach as a teacher, a mentor, an exemplar, and a colleague extends far outside and beyond her classroom. Her “dedication to being inclusive, warm, and welcoming” has fostered an academic community of medievalists who strive to keep her wisdom, wit and teaching legacy alive in their own craft.

Amy Livingstone is the H.O. Hirt Professor of History at Wittenberg University, Amy is a dedicated and efflorescent teacher, scholar, mentor and colleague. She endeavors to share her love of the middle ages and the exploration of the past, its places, people, texts and ways of knowing, with all who interact with her, inside and outside the classroom. She has transformed the curriculum, innovated new programs and institutions, fellowships and methods, and made her approach to pedagogy accessible and admirable. For her students, “medieval history became something almost tangible which [they] could apply to the society around [them].”

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Call for Papers – 93rd Annual Meeting of the Medieval Academy of America

Posted on February 8, 2017 by Chris

93rd ANNUAL MEETING
OF THE
MEDIEVAL ACADEMY
OF AMERICA

Emory University, Atlanta Georgia
1 – 3 March 2018

Call for Proposals

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. Please note: the prohibition against presenting a paper more than once every three years is no longer in effect.

Location: Emory Conference Center Hotel, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia.

Emory University is pleased to host the Medieval Academy of America for the first time since 1984. Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson Airport is the busiest in the world, and travel is made even more convenient by the recent addition of the Maynard H. Jackson Jr. International Terminal. Atlanta is also home to the High Museum of Art, Emory’s Michael C. Carlos Museum, the Martin Luther King Center, the Civil Rights Museum, the Center for Disease Control, and of course, the Coca-Cola Museum. A more ambitious trip, approximately an hour and a half south of the city, takes you to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Little White House in Warm Springs, Georgia. The entire conference will be held and housed at the Emory Conference Center, a Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired building located on a 26-acre forest preserve. Shops and restaurants are adjacent at Emory Point.

Emory University: http://www.emory.edu

Emory Conference Center: http://www.emoryconferencecenter.com

Emory Point: http://www.emory-point.com

Theme(s): The Medieval Academy welcomes innovative sessions that cross traditional disciplinary boundaries or that use various disciplinary approaches to examine an individual topic. To both facilitate and emphasize interdisciplinarity, the Call for Papers is organized in “themes.”

Proposals: Individuals may propose to offer a paper in one of the themes below, a full panel of papers and speakers, a full panel of papers and speakers for a theme they wish to create, or a single paper not designated for a specific theme. Sessions usually consist of three 25-minute papers, and proposals should be geared to that length, although the committee is interested in other formats as well (poster sessions, digital experiences, etc.). The Program Committee may choose a different format for some sessions after the proposals have been reviewed.

In order to be considered, proposals must be complete and include the following:

(1) A cover sheet containing the proposer’s name, statement of Medieval Academy membership (or statement that the individual’s specialty would not normally involve membership in the Academy), professional status, email address, postal address, home or cell and office telephone numbers, fax number (if available), and paper title;

(2) A second sheet containing the proposer’s name, theme for which the paper should be considered, paper title, 500-word abstract, and audio-visual equipment requirements;

(3) Additional sheets as necessary containing all of the above information when a full panel for a session is being proposed.

Submissions: Proposals should be submitted as attached PDFs to the MAA Program Committee by email to MAA2018@TheMedievalAcademy.org

The deadline is 15 May 2017.

Please do not send proposals directly to Program Committee members.

Selection Procedure: Paper and panel proposals will be reviewed for their quality, the significance of their topics, and their relevance to the conference threads. The Program Committee will evaluate proposals during the summer of 2017, and the Committee will inform all successful and unsuccessful proposers by 1 September 2017.

Themes:

1. Representing the Mysteries of Faith in Art, Liturgy, and Devotion
2. The Religious Orders: Diffusion of Artistic and Religious Practices between Monastery and City
3. The Medieval Artes and their Books
4. The Long Fourteenth Century
5. Transconfessional Spaces in Andalusi Cities
6. Umayyad Córdoba and Nasrid Granada: Poetry, Philosophy, and Architecture
7. Restoring Medieval Buildings: Gains, Problems, and Technologies
8. Materiality of Medieval Objects: What Now?
9. Monumental Narratives: Bayeux and Beyond
10. Legal History of Landholding and Property
11. New Medieval Economic Institutions
12. Legacy of Rome: Legal, Literary, and Artistic
13. Migration, Movement, and Slavery
14. Female Spirituality and Mysticism
15. Bible Translation and Reform Movements
16. Medieval Cosmographies and Geographies
17. Trade and Material Culture in the Mediterranean
18. Chaucer and the Poets
19. Anglo-Saxon Objects and Spaces, Poems and Places
20. Faith and Inquiry: Exegesis, Speculative Theology, and Normative Argument
21. Faith and Culture: Devotional Practices, Symbolism, and Lived Religion
22. Transgressing “Isms”: Platonism, Aristotelianism, Stoicism . . .
23. Comparative Kingship from the Carolingians to 1300
24. Truth, “Truthiness,” and Falsehood in Documentary Practice

Emory Program Committee

Co-chairs: Elizabeth Carson Pastan and James H. Morey

Richard Barton (University of North Carolina, Greensboro)
John Bugge
C. Jean Campbell
María Carrión
Kevin Corrigan
Judith Evans-Grubbs
Roxani Margariti
Walter Melion
Philp Reynolds
Alexander Volokh

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2017 Annual Meeting Registration

Posted on February 6, 2017 by Chris

92nd ANNUAL MEETING OF THE MEDIEVAL ACADEMY OF AMERICA
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
April 6-8, 2017

Registration for the 92nd Annual Meeting of the Medieval Academy of America is now open.

Click here to register, or use this link:

https://medievalacademy.site-ym.com/events/register.aspx?id=924877

For the program and hotel information, please visit the conference website: https://maa2017.com/

The conference, which takes place 6-8 April 2017 (followed by the CARA meeting on 9 April), features three plenary speakers and over fifty concurrent sessions, including thematic threads such as ‘The Medieval Mediterranean,’ ‘Manuscript Studies,’ ‘Old English Studies’ and many others. Roundtable discussions focus on topics such as K-12 education, diversity in the medieval studies classroom, compatible careers, and scholarly publication in the age of Open Access. The conference location is the St. George Campus of the University of Toronto, with selected parts of the program held at the Art Gallery of Ontario and the closing plenary at the Aga Khan Museum.

We look forward to seeing you in Toronto!

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2017 Class of Fellows

Posted on February 6, 2017 by Chris

The Medieval Academy of America is pleased to announce the 2017 Class of Fellows and Corresponding Fellows:

FELLOWS:
Uta-Renate Blumenthal (Emerita, The Catholic University of America)
Susan Einbinder (University of Connecticut)
Douglas Kelly (University of Wisconsin – Madison)
Thomas F. Kelly (Harvard University)

CORRESPONDING FELLOWS:
Nicole Bériou (Institut de recherche et d’histoire des textes, Paris)
Michael Clanchy (Emeritus, Institute of Historical Research, University of London)
Averil Cameron (University of Oxford)

These scholars are being honored for their notable contributions to the field of Medieval Studies and were elected by the current Fellows. More information about the Fellows of the Medieval Academy of America is available here. New Fellows will be officially inducted during the upcoming Annual Meeting of the Medieval Academy in Toronto. The induction ceremony will take place at 4:30 PM on Saturday, 8 April, at the Aga Khan Museum.

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Ahmanson Research Fellowship

Posted on February 2, 2017 by Chris

Ahmanson Research Fellowships support the use of UCLA Library Special Collections’ extensive holdings in medieval and Renaissance manuscripts and printed books. Graduate students or scholars holding a PhD (or the foreign equivalent) who are engaged in graduate-level, postdoctoral, or independent research are invited to apply by the deadline of March 1, 2017. More information is at the UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies website at http://cmrs.ucla.edu/awards-fellowships/ahmanson/.

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Call for Papers – Mary Jaharis Center Sponsored Panel, 43rd Annual Byzantine Studies Conference

Posted on February 2, 2017 by Chris

As part of its ongoing commitment to Byzantine studies, the Mary Jaharis Center for Byzantine Art and Culture seeks proposals for a Mary Jaharis Center sponsored session at the 43rd Annual Byzantine Studies Conference to be held at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, Minneapolis, MN, October 5–8, 2017. We invite session proposals on any topic relevant to Byzantine studies.

Session proposals must be submitted through the Mary Jaharis Center website site (https://maryjahariscenter.org/sponsored-sessions/43rd-annual-byzantine-studies-conference). The deadline for submission is February 15, 2017. Proposals should include:

—Proposed session title

—CV of session organizer

—300-word session summary, which includes a summary of the overall topic, the format for the panel (such as a debate, papers followed by a discussion, or a traditional session of papers), and the reasons for covering the topic as a prearranged, whole session

—Session chair and academic affiliation. Please note: Session chairs cannot present a paper in the session

—Information about the four papers to be presented in the session. For each paper: name of presenter and academic affiliation, proposed paper title, and 500-word abstract. Please note: Presenters must be members of BSANA in good standing

Session organizers may present a paper in the session or chair the session. If a co-organzier is proposed for the session, the co-organizer must also give a paper in the session or chair the session.

Applicants will be notified by February 20, 2017. The organizer of the selected session is responsible for submitting the session to the BSC by March 1, 2017. Instructions for submitting the panel proposal are included in the BSC Call for Papers (https://maryjahariscenter.org/assets/sponsored-sessions/2017_BSANA_Call_for_Papers_FINAL.pdf).

If the proposed session is approved, the Mary Jaharis Center will reimburse session participants (presenters and chair, if the proposed chair is selected by the BSC program committee) up to $600 maximum for North American residents and up to $1200 maximum for those coming from abroad. Funding is through reimbursement only; advance funding cannot be provided. Eligible expenses include conference registration, transportation, and food and lodging. Receipts are required for reimbursement.

Please contact Brandie Ratliff (mjcbac@hchc.edu), Director, Mary Jaharis Center for Byzantine Art and Culture with any questions.

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2017 NEH Summer Seminar

Posted on February 2, 2017 by Chris

John N. King of The Ohio State University and Mark Rankin of James Madison University will direct a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar for College and University Teachers on continuity and change in the production, dissemination, and reading of Western European books during the 200 years following the advent of printing with movable type. In particular, they plan to pose the governing question of whether the advent of printing was a necessary precondition for the Protestant Reformation. Participants will consider ways in which adherents of different religious faiths shared common ground in exploiting elements such as book layout, typography, illustration, and paratext (e.g., prefaces, glosses, and commentaries) in order to inspire reading, but also to restrict interpretation. Employing key methods of the History of the Book, our investigation will consider how the physical nature of books affected ways in which readers understood and assimilated their intellectual contents. This program is geared to meet the needs of teacher-scholars interested in the literary, political, or cultural history of the Renaissance and/or Reformation, the History of the Book, art history, women’s studies, religious studies, bibliography, print culture, library science (including rare book librarians), mass communication, literacy studies, and more.

This seminar will meet from 18 June until 15 July 2017 at The Huntington Library in San Marino, CA, one of the nation’s leading research and cultural centers. Among the Library’s 420,000 rare books and seven million manuscripts are major holdings in medieval manuscripts, books printed before 1501, Renaissance history and literature, maps, travel literature, and the history of science, medicine, and technology. The Huntington also boasts art galleries containing 650 paintings and 440 works of sculpture, as well as twelve botanical gardens containing 15,000 plant varieties.

Those eligible to apply include citizens of USA who are engaged in teaching at the college or university level and independent scholars who have received the terminal degree in their field (usually the Ph.D.). In addition, non-US citizens who have taught and lived in the USA for at least three years prior to March 2017 are eligible to apply. NEH will provide participants with a stipend of $3,300. Up to three spaces will be reserved for adjunct faculty.

Full details and application information are available at http://sites.jmu.edu/NEHformation-reformation-books2017/. For further information, please contact rankinmc@jmu.edu. The deadline for application is March 1, 2017.