The Medieval Academy Blog

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.

Agnieszka brings to Speculum broad interests in medieval studies. She has taught classes on the early and High Middle Ages, as well as the history of magic across the continent. As a curatorial assistant at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, she worked to raise awareness of the Eastern European materials, including the library’s Armenian manuscripts. As a research assistant at Yale she was involved in editing many publications, including articles and books.

Her work relies on manuscripts held in archives across Europe and the US, including most recently, the Biblioteka Ksiąząt Czartoryskich in Cracow, Poland and the Estense Library in Modena, Italy. She has received funding from FLAS, the Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry, the Leiden University Library, and the Fulbright Commission, among others.

Dr. Rec holds a BS in Mathematics and Humanities (with distinction) from Yale, and studied for a post-bac year at the Center for Women in Math at Smith College before pursuing a doctoral degree in History.

Agnieszka will join the Speculum team in July, overlapping with the current one-year postdoc, Sara Torres, for about a month. We look forward to welcoming her to Dunster St.

Grab your passport and meet us in Toronto!

Registration for the 93rd Annual Meeting of the Medieval Academy of America is now open. Register by 13 March to avoid the late-registration fee. Click here for information and to register:

https://medievalacademy.site-ym.com/?page=2017Meeting.

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.

Please note: the prohibition against presenting a paper more than once every three years is no longer in effect.

Click here  for the full call for papers.

As always, the Medieval Academy of America will have a strong presence at the 2017 International Congress on Medieval Studies  (May 11-14).

1) The Friday morning plenary, sponsored by the Academy, will be delivered by Leor Halevi (Vanderbilt Univ.). His topic will be “Artifacts of the Infidel: Medieval and Modern Interpretations of the Sacred Law of Islam” (Friday, 8:30 AM, Bernhard, East Ballroom). Two related sessions  organized by Prof. Halevi will take place on Friday at 1:30 PM (Session 276) and 3:30 PM (Session 335). Both sessions will take place in the Bernhard Brown & Gold Room.

2) On Thursday at 3:30 PM, the Graduate Student Committee is sponsoring a roundtable titled “To ‘Gladly Teche’: Becoming Great Teachers in Graduate School” (Session 113, Schneider 1280). The GSC reception will take place immediately afterwards, in Fetzer 1055.

3) The Committee on Centers and Regional Associations (CARA) is sponsoring two panels this year. The first, “Teaching a Diverse and Inclusive Middle Ages,” will take place on Friday at 10 AM (Session 182, Schneider 1120). The second, “Career Diversity for Medievalists: Insights from Outside the Academy,” will take place on Saturday at 1:30 PM (Session 404, Fetzer 1045).

4) The annual CARA Luncheon will take place on Friday at noon (Bernhard, President’s Dining Room). If you would like to attend as a representative of your program or institution, please register online. There is no fee to attend, but pre-registration is required. All are welcome!

5) Finally, we invite you to stop by our staffed table in the exhibit hall to introduce yourself, transact any Medieval Academy business you may have, or pick up some chocolate to keep you going during those long afternoon sessions.

See you at the ‘Zoo!

MAA/CARA Summer Scholarships
The MAA/CARA Summer Scholarships support graduate students and especially promising undergraduate students participating in summer courses in medieval languages or manuscript studies. Applicants must be members of the Medieval Academy in good standing with at least one year of graduate school remaining and must demonstrate both the importance of the summer course to their program of study and their home institution’s inability to offer analogous coursework. Click here for more information. The due date for applications is 15 April.

Travel Grants
The Medieval Academy provides a limited number of travel grants to help Academy members who hold doctorates but are not in full-time faculty positions, or are adjuncts without access to institutional funding, attend conferences to present their work. The deadline for meetings taking place between 1 September 2016 and 28 February 2017 is May 1.

Click here for more information.

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.

The 2017 Mentorship Program is currently seeking participation from faculty, graduate and undergraduate students. These professional exchanges are intended to help students establish professional contacts from whom they can receive advice regarding their academic development and career. The primary intent of the exchange is to foster an active relationship during an academic conference; however, mentors and mentees may choose to continue a line of communication after the conference has ended.

Dates and Deadlines for 2017 are as follows:

Medieval Academy of America meeting (April 6-8 in Toronto, Canada), sign-up deadline: 10 March 2017

ICMS Kalamazoo (May 11-14), sign-up deadline: 14 April 2017

IMC Leeds (July 3-6), sign-up deadline: 2 June 2017

Due to the organizational demands of the program, it may be necessary to restrict the number of participants, so please sign up early! Mentor shortages in this popular program have been a reality in past years, so if you know faculty attending these conferences, please encourage them to volunteer.

Sign up online here.

The Medieval Academy of America is very pleased to announce that the 2017 MAA/GSC Grant in Innovation in Community Building and Professionalization has been awarded to The 17th Annual Vagantes Medieval Graduate Student Conference, to be held at the University of Minnesota, 22-24 March 2018.

The MAA/GSC Grants support collaborative projects conceived and developed by teams of graduate students. Now in its third year, the program has supported  six such initiatives. We are very pleased to be able to support these innovative and important projects.

Jeffrey J. Cohen (George Washington Univ.) has been awarded the 2017 Réné Wellek Prize for the best book in comparative literature from the American Comparative Literature Association for his monograph, Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman (Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2015).

Benjamin R. Gampel (Jewish Theological Seminary of America) has been awarded the 2016 National Jewish Book Council’s Nahum M. Sarna Memorial Award in Scholarship for his monograph, Anti-Jewish Riots in the Crown of Aragon and the Royal Response, 1391-1392 (Cambridge University Press, 2016).

Therese Martin (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas, Madrid) has been awarded the 2016 prize for the best essay in the field of medieval feminist scholarship in 2015 and 2016 from The Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship, for her essay, “The Margin to Act: A Framework for Medieval Women’s (and Men’s) Art-Making,” Journal of Medieval History 42. 1 (2016), 1-25.

Amy Remensnyder (Brown Univ.) has been awarded a 2017 Berlin Prize, which will allow her to spend a semester at the American Academy in Berlin.

If you have good news to share, please contact Executive Director Lisa Fagin Davis.