The Medieval Academy Blog

Dear MAA Members:

At our February 2016 Annual Meeting in Boston, the Council of the MAA, in anticipation of the upcoming centenary of the founding of the Academy in 1925, voted to constitute a long-range planning committee to review our role in medieval studies as we move forward into our second century. I was charged with the constitution of that committee. I write to inform you that this Centennial Planning Committee is now in place as follows:

Richard Unger (Univ. of British Columbia), Chair
Patrick Geary (Institute for Advanced Study)
Anne Lester, CARA Chair (Univ. of Colorado, Boulder)
Eugene Lyman, MAA Treasurer
Elizabeth Morrison (The Getty Museum)
Kathryn Reyerson (Univ. of Minnesota)
Barbara Shailor (Yale Univ.)
Jerry Singerman (Univ. of Pennsylvania Press)
Nicholas Watson (Harvard Univ.)
Lisa Fagin Davis (Ex-officio, Medieval Academy of America)

I am most grateful to all the members of the Centennial Planning Committee for their willingness to serve for the three-year duration of the Committee, and especially to Richard Unger, a very active member and former President of the MAA, for taking on the additional burden of chairing it. Richard is already developing strategies to reach out to the entire MAA community as the committee works to discern its tasks; you will hear from him directly within the next few weeks.

With best wishes for a restful and productive summer,

Carmela Vircillo Franklin, President, Medieval Academy of America

Sara V. Torres (2014 Ph.D. UCLA) has been awarded the 2016-17 editorial postdoctoral fellowship at Speculum. Sara was selected from a pool of more than forty applicants. She will join the Speculum team in July and work as a full-time editorial assistant for one year. During this time she will oversee the book review process and contribute to the editing and production of the entire journal.

Dr. Torres is currently a Lecturer in English at the University of California, Los Angeles, with interests in global and comparative medieval studies and history of the book. Her research focuses on the cultural exchange between England and Iberia during the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries and traces the movement of dynastic narratives over political borders.

Sara brings to the postdoctoral fellowship strong editorial experience, having served as assistant editor of the University of California Press quarterly Boom; freelance copyeditor; editorial research assistant for Prof. Barbara Fuchs; cataloguer of a collection of 17th- and 18th-century British religious pamphlets, including late medieval and colonial American legal documents; and member of the editorial board of Comitatus: A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies.

In addition to receiving a Medieval Academy Shallek Award in 2010, Sara has been the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships, including a travel grant from the Institute for the Editing of Historical Documents and a scholarship from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation.

We are thrilled to welcome her to the staff and look forward to working with her.

As always, the Medieval Academy of America had a strong presence at Kalamazoo. The Medieval Academy plenary lecture delivered by Jane Chance (Rice Univ.) was well-attended and -received, generating much discussion and comment about Tolkien and his take on female characters in Anglo-Saxon literature. The two associated sessions on “How We Read” were very well-attended as well.

The two roundtables sponsored by CARA addressed important topics and sparked lively discussions: “Writing the Middle Ages for Multiple Audiences” and “Addressing Career Diversity for Medievalists.” The annual CARA Luncheon followed the same model as last year. Each of the more than forty attendees was assigned to a table at which facilitated discussions of various topics took place. Participants shared issues of concern and helped each other brainstorm solutions and strategies. Some discussions have continued by email as participants follow-up on ideas and suggestions. Finally, the Graduate Student Committee hosted its own roundtable, “The Modern Grail: Insider Tips from Search Committees to Land That Academic Job,” followed by a reception.

Even though the wine hours had been relocated from Valley III to Bernhard, our staffed table in the exhibit hall served as a lively homebase, with many Congress attendees stopping by to conduct business, ask questions, or just say hello. We want to send a warm welcome to the fifty new MAA members who received free one-year memberships. We look forward to working with you all in the coming year.

If you’re going to be at Leeds this year, please join us Tuesday evening (5 July) at 7 PM for the MAA Annual Lecture, to be presented by Elaine Treharne (Stanford Univ.), “Manuscript Edges, Marginal Time: Why Medieval Matters.” Afterwards, join Executive Director Lisa Fagin Davis and Speculum Editor Sarah Spence for the Medieval Academy’s open-bar wine reception.

The Graduate Student Committee is sponsoring a roundtable on Monday (4 July) at 7 PM titled “More Famine than Feast?: Preparing for the Academic Job Search,” followed by a reception.

We hope to see you there!

The July issue of Speculum is now available online and will soon be at your door. In  addition to book reviews, Memoirs, and the Proceedings of the Annual Meeting, the issue includes the following articles:

Speculum 91:3 (JULY 2016)

Barbara Newman (Presidential Address)
“Annihilation and Authorship: Three Women Mystics of the 1290s”

Victoria McAlister
“Castles and Connectivity: Exploring the Economic Networks between Tower Houses, Settlement, and Trade in Late Medieval Ireland”

Roland Betancourt
“Tempted to Touch: Tactility, Ritual, and Mediation in Byzantine Visuality”

Katherine Lindeman
“Fighting Words: Vengeance, Jews, and Saint Vicent Ferrer in Late Medieval Valencia”

Charles Russell Stone
“Proud Kings, Polyglot Scribes, and the I3 Historia de preliis: The Origins of Latin Alexander Romance in Norman and Staufen Italy”

To access Speculum online, follow these steps:

1) Go to http://medievalacademy.org;
2) Sign in to your MAA account;
3) Open the Speculum pulldown menu and click on “Speculum online”;
4) Follow the link on that page.

Tripoli, Bohemond VI or VII, gold bezant, 1251-87. Courtesy of Princeton University Numismatic Collection.

We are very pleased to announce the winners of the 2016 MAA/CARA Summer Scholarships, supporting student participation in summer courses in medieval languages or manuscript studies:

Lorenzo Bondioli (Oxford Univ. and Princeton Univ.): Classical Arabic (Qasid Arabic Language Institute, Amman, Jordan)

Hayley R. Bowman (Univ. of Michigan): Reading Aljamiado (University of Colorado, Boulder)

Joseph Michael Genens (Univ. of Missouri, Columbia): Paleography and Codicology: A Seminar on Medieval Manuscript Studies (University of New Mexico)

Amanda Nerbovig (Univ. of Colorado at Boulder): International Summer Paleography School (University of London)

Sarah Rose Shivers (Univ. of North Texas): Ancient Latin (King’s College London)

Sarah J. Sprouse (Texas Tech Univ.): Paleography and Codicology: A Seminar on Medieval Manuscript Studies (University of New Mexico)

Cameron Joseph Wachowich (Univ. of Toronto, NUI Galway): Level 2 Breton (University of Western Brittany)

Manon C. Williams (Univ. of Colorado at Boulder): Paleography and Codicology: A Seminar on Medieval Manuscript Studies (University of New Mexico)

Last month’s call for good news resulted in the following announcements:

Sarah Bromberg (Suffolk Univ.) has received the Newberry Library-John Rylands Research Institute Exchange fellowship for her book project, Art and Exegesis: Nicholas of Lyra’s Postilla.

Lilla Kopar (The Catholic Univ. of America) reports that Project Andvari: A Portal to the Visual World of Early Medieval Northern Europe (andvari.org) has received an NEH ODH Level II start-up grant. This is the second NEH grant for Andvari. The project is co-directed by Nancy Wicker (Univ. of Mississippi) and Kopar, in collaboration with Worthy Martin and Daniel Pitti at IATH at UVA.

Nicole Marafioti (Trinity Univ, San Antonio) has been awarded an ACLS Burkhardt Fellowship for 2016-17, with a residency at the National Humanities Center.

Cary J. Nederman (Texas A&M) was recently elected President of the Board of Directors of the Journal of the History of Ideas.

Nina Rowe (Fordham Univ.) was awarded twelve-month fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies, as well as a Franklin Research Grant from the American Philosophical Society, to work on her new project, The World in a Book: Weltchroniken and Society at the End of the Middle Ages.

Corine Schleif (Arizona State Univ.) was awarded a Berlin prize and  is currently John P. Birkelund Fellow in the Humanities at the American  Academy in Berlin.

Zrinka Stahuljak (Univ. of California, Los Angeles) has received a Guggenheim Fellowship to support her book project, “Medieval Fixers: Translation in the Mediterranean (1250-1500).”

Alison Stones (Emerita, Univ. of Pittsburgh) was recently elected a Correspondant étranger honoraire of the Société nationale des antiquaires de France.

Nancy Wicker (Univ. of Mississippi) has been awarded the Allen W. Clowes Fellowship from the National Humanities Center at Research Triangle, North Carolina, where she will be in residence for the 2016-2017 academic year, working on Viking Art in Scandinavian and across the Viking Diaspora: Patrons, Producers, and Consumers from the Fifth through the Eleventh Centuries.

Congratulations to all! If you have something you’d like to share, please send your good news to Executive Director Lisa Fagin Davis (LFD@TheMedievalAcademy.org).