The next online meeting of the Race and Gender Working Group will take place on March 8 from noon – 1:30pm EST.
Jonathan Correa-Reyes (Clemson University) will speak on “Towards a Christian Genre of Man: Revisiting The Siege of Jerusalem.” Dr. Dorothy Kim (Brandeis University) will be the respondent.
Click here for more information and to register.
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 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. Click here for more information.
The Medieval Academy Inclusivity and Diversity Book Subvention Program provides subventions of up to $5000 to university or other non-profit scholarly presses to support the publication of books that contribute to diversity and inclusion in the field of Medieval Studies (broadly conceived) by Medieval Academy members. Click here for more information.
Applications for subventions will be accepted only from the publisher and only for books that have already been approved for publication. Eligible Academy members who wish to have their books considered for a subvention should ask their publishers to apply directly to the Academy, following the guidelines outlined on the relevant webpage. The deadline for proposals is 1 May 2024.
We are very pleased to announce the winners of the 2024 CARA Prizes:
The 2024 CARA Award for Excellence in Teaching has been awarded to Angela Mariani (Texas Tech Univ.).
The 2024 Robert L. Kindrick–CARA Award for Outstanding Service to Medieval Studies has been awarded to two scholars: Marjorie Harrington (Western Michigan Univ.) and Geraldine Heng (Univ. of Texas at Austin).
These prizes will be presented during the CARA Plenary Session at the upcoming Annual Meeting of the Medieval Academy on Friday, 15 March, at 10:30 AM. Please join us as we honor these medievalists for their teaching and service.
For more information about the MAA Committee for Centers and Regional Associations (CARA), please visit our website.
1) Digital Latin Library Open-Access Editions: Three new editions of medieval Latin Texts have been recently published in the open-access “Library of Digital Latin Texts” repository, in collaboration with the Medieval Academy of America. Click here for more information about these publications and to learn how your edition can be part of this ongoing project.
2) Database of Medieval Digital Resources (MDR): We continue to update the MDR database with newly-vetted open-access resources for teaching and research. Click here to access the 266 resources in the database and check back regularly for updates.
3) Medieval Academy Books: Thirty-eight of the 118 volumes in the Medieval Academy Books series can be accessed as PDFs or .html files here. There are copies for sale at this link as well; sign into your MAA account for the members’ discount.
4) MAA Webinars: All Medieval Academy webinars are recorded and freely-accessible here.
5) Multicultural Middle Ages Podcast: The Multicultural Middle Ages is produced by the MAA’s Graduate Student Committee and is available wherever you get your podcasts. The programming includes quarterly podcasts devoted to the current issue of Speculum.
6) Speculum Online: Don’t forget that as a perquisite of membership you have complimentary access to the entire 99-year run of Speculum. Click here for more information.
The Institute of Medieval and Early Modern Studies (IMEMS) at Durham University is happy to announce the launch our online Learning Centre, which currently offers two new online palaeography courses:
You can find full details on our website: www.imemsdurhamlearn.com. Our courses will provide quality skills training to facilitate working with manuscripts, whether at graduate level or for those working in a professional environment as a librarian, archivist, etc.
The first courses will run from April 29th to May 10th 2024. These are online, full-time courses that will consist of asynchronous content and also daily live sessions. Students will receive feedback on a portfolio of transcriptions after the course, as well as continued access to the asynchronous material for two months.
There are limited spaces (24 students per course), so applications are now open. We would appreciate it if you could circulate this announcement via your networks.
The final deadline for applications is March 30th, but we encourage early applications as places will be offered to successful candidates on a first-come, first-served basis.
With best wishes,
The IMEMS Team
Institute of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Durham University
durham.ac.uk/imems
twitter.com/IMEMSDurham
facebook.com/imems.durham
With the retirement of Editor Katherine Jansen forthcoming in 2025, the Medieval Academy of America seeks to appoint an Editor, or co-Editors, for Speculum. The position is configured as part-time, requiring between 20 and 30 hours per week, with some seasonal variation. The Editor is appointed for a 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 demonstrated organizational and decision-making skills. Experience in journal, book, or series editing will be helpful but not necessary. The term of appointment begins in January of 2025. Terms and conditions are to be negotiated. Please note: the MAA does not offer remuneration for this position, aside from a summer stipend if the Editor is a faculty member, although the MAA may be able to continue offering support for otherwise staffing the journal (currently a Managing Editor and Associate Editor). It is understood that the Editor will negotiate terms of support with a host institution and these terms should be explicitly described as part of the application dossier. Interested parties should plan to attend an online information session in late May; details will be announced soon.
The search committee seeks to identify a diverse pool of candidates, and the MAA is eager to accommodate the various modes of professional life that characterize our profession. The Editor will likely need access to a major research library and to postdoctoral scholars or graduate students who can be hired for assistance, although some of this work can be done remotely.
Applications should be sent to the MAA by July 15, 2024. Virtual interviews will be held in the early Fall of 2024, with a start date in January of 2025. Cover letters may be addressed to Sara Lipton, Chair of the Search Committee. In addition to a curriculum vitae, the cover letter should include: the candidate’s vision for the journal and a discussion of how they envision configuring the staff. The applicant should describe in detail the institutional support they will bring to the position. 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 short-listed candidates. The Chair of the search committee 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. Interested parties should plan to attend an online information session in late May; details will be announced soon.
Land in the Middle Ages and Renaissance
The 29th Biennial Conference of the Medieval and Renaissance Studies Program of Barnard College
Barnard College, New York City
December 7, 2024
King Lear begins with a so-called love test that is also a problem of land. Having decided to divide up his territory among his daughters, the old king demands from them in exchange a profession of love. “Which of you shall we say doth love us most?” Almost immediately, problems of land ownership become “interessed” with seemingly less concrete aspects of human interrelationship. When his eldest daughter, Goneril, professes a limitless love that is without bounds, for example, Lear gives her land that is limited and that exists within “these bounds”: forests and meads that stretch, he explains, “from this line to this.” If in this case the granting of land is transactional, it is also resistant to any system of fungibility or equivalence. Land is on the one hand inherently material and tangible, but is on the other hand also abstract, symbolic, and often spiritual.
The 29th biennial conference of the Barnard Medieval and Renaissance Studies Program will explore the intractably complex meaning of land in the long period from approximately 400 to 1700. This one-day, interdisciplinary conference will bring together scholars of multiple disciplines (art history, history, literary studies, religion, history of science, legal history). Topics could include but are not limited to the following: boundaries, environment, enclosure law, surveying and measurement of land, trees and vegetation, pastoral poetry, claims of geographic origin, waste, shifting national boundaries, agrarian practices, herding, migration, indigeneity, and vernacularity.
The conference will be held Saturday, December 7, 2024 on the Barnard College campus in New York City.
Plenary Speakers:
Eleanor Johnson, Columbia University
Rebecca Zorach, Northwestern University
PLEASE NOTE: THIS CONFERENCE WILL BE IN PERSON.
Please submit an abstract of 250-300 words and a 2-page CV to Rachel Eisendrath, reisendr@barnard.edu.
Submission Deadline: May 1, 2024
The Mary Jaharis Center for Byzantine Art and Culture and the Mashtots Professor of Armenian Studies at Harvard University are pleased to announce the next lecture in the 2023–2024 East of Byzantium lecture series.
Tuesday, February 27, 2024 | 12:00 PM (EST, UTC -5) | Zoom
Political Rituals and Urban Communities in Cilician Armenia
Gohar Grigoryan, University of Fribourg
Outdoor rituals were among those rare occasions when medieval rulers and ruling aristocracies could be seen in person and inspected publicly. As in many medieval societies, so also in the Armenian kingdom of Cilicia (1198–1375), these public ceremonies were almost always performed in front of urban communities. While the political and propagandistic concerns of these aesthetic enactments come as little surprise, the present lecture will address the question from the point of view of those city inhabitants who were to contemplate—and in some cases, to partake in—the carefully organized and well-pondered rituals of the men of power.
Gohar Grigoryan is a senior researcher at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, Department of Art History and Archaeology. She received her PhD from the same university in 2017 for her dissertation on royal images in Cilician Armenia. She is the author of many essays on medieval Armenian art and history and co-editor of three books, including, most recently, Staging the Ruler’s Body in Medieval Cultures, published by Brepols/Harvey Miller (2023).
Advance registration required. Register: https://eastofbyzantium.org/upcoming-events/
Contact Brandie Ratliff (mjcbac@hchc.edu), Director, Mary Jaharis Center for Byzantine Art and Culture with any questions.
An East of Byzantium lecture. EAST OF BYZANTIUM is a partnership between the Mashtots Professor of Armenian Studies at Harvard University and the Mary Jaharis Center that explores the cultures of the eastern frontier of the Byzantine empire in the late antique and medieval periods.
In celebration of its upcoming 2025 Centennial, the Medieval Academy of America has earmarked funding for a series of Centennial Grants of up to $5,000 each supporting the planning and implementation of local events and projects celebrating and promoting medieval studies in education and the arts in North America. We are very pleased to announce the winners of the first round of MAA Centennial Grants:
The Bayeux Tapestry from Scratch (PI: Elizabeth K. Hebbard, Indiana University):
The Bayeux Tapestry from Scratch (BTFS) Project will mobilize experimental and experiential methods in humanities learning and research in Medieval Studies. BTFS celebrates traditional skills and artistry as an introduction to medieval culture more broadly, with a focus on the 70-meter-long textile depicting the background and events of the Battle of Hastings in 1066, likely produced for Odo of Bayeux shortly after the Norman Conquest and, it is believed, designed for display in the Bayeux cathedral. Likely called a tapestry because of its display context, the Bayeux Tapestry is actually an embroidery featuring the work of many anonymous and probably women needlecraft artists using an embroidery technique of laid and couched work, as well as some other stitches identified through intensive study of the object during its careful restoration. The project will consist of a series of workshops walking participants through the many knowledge- and labor-intensive steps behind the creation of the textile, beginning with the planting of flax in the Book Lab’s academic garden at the IU Hilltop Garden and Nature Center. The workshops do not aim to recreate the Bayeux Tapestry, but instead to build knowledge and understanding around premodern agricultural and craft practices.
The Interconnected Middle Ages (PI: Michael A. Ryan, University of New Mexico):
This grant will support the 39th annual Helen Damico Memorial Lecture Series, sponsored by the Institute for Medieval Studies at the University of New Mexico in 2025. For the 39th annual Helen Damico Memorial Lecture Series, the proposed theme would be “The Interconnected Middle Ages.” This proposed theme centers the interconnectivity of the medieval past within much larger networks that operate on three levels. First, speakers could potentially share research on how medieval societies were interconnected on individual levels. How, for instance, did people within specific and local medieval societies connect with (or conversely turn from) each other on multiple levels? Second, speakers might choose to focus their remarks on the interconnectivity of medieval societies with other contemporary societies around the world, part of a growing movement on scholarship focusing on the “Global Middle Ages.” Finally, invited scholars might investigate how the Middle Ages interconnected temporally, located specifically between antiquity and early modernity and, more generally, as a crucial component that fashioned a premodern past linked with today.
Medievalists of Northern Louisiana (PI: Edward Holt, Grambling State University):
Grambling State University’s History Department will create a lecture series which highlights and promotes the vibrancy of medieval studies in Northern Louisiana. Held in Spring 2025, this series of six (6) lectures will showcase research by local medievalists through providing a venue to share their work with public audiences (student, faculty, and community). This series will culminate in a lecture by Dr. Monica Green, who will demonstrate possible futures for the field through her work at the intersection of digital, public, scientific, and (of course) medieval.
The Middle Ages for Educators Open Access Resource (OAR) Sweet Sixteen Playoffs (PI: Laura Morreale, Independent Scholar/Princeton University):
MAFE is always looking to expand both its content and user base and bring engaging materials about the medieval past to educators and the general public. Together with the stated support of the MAA’s K-12 committee, MAFE proposes a good-natured competition among medievalist colleagues to encourage contributions to the site, make educators aware of these OARs, and solicit K-12 educator expertise in creating and disseminating these same materials. The competition will be structured as a bracketed tournament featuring sixteen initial competitors in a single elimination competition. Initial submissions will be judged by a panel of K-12 educators and feedback offered, then the final decisions made by public viewing and voting. All semi-finalists’ projects will be featured at the MAA 2025 centennial meeting in Boston. Semi-finalists will receive a cash prize for their contributions and a stipend to attend a lunch-time roundtable at the Centennial Meeting on creating effective OARs for medieval studies.
Public Medieval: A Workshop for Graduate Students, ECRs, and Underemployed Medievalists (PI: Matthew Gabriele, Virginia Tech):
Virginia Tech (with partnership from UVA) proposes to host a 2 day workshop to mentor graduate students, early career researchers, and underemployed MedievALLists doing public-facing work. The symposium will be held in Fall 2024 (so that the training can be put into practice and events planned for the following year) and will be modeled on a “Public Classics” workshop held at Northwestern in October 2019. We will bring in several prominent public medievalists as mentors, who, over the course of our workshop, will staff roundtables touching including pitching to magazines/ newspapers, trade publishing, social media presence (and safety), working with local stakeholders and the community, the logistics of organizing in-person (and online) events, etc. In addition, and perhaps most importantly, each mentor will pair with a small group of participants as mentees, with significant time devoted to building relationships by discussing and adapting the participants’ own interests to their specific situations. Ideally, these will be the beginnings of long-term mentoring relationships, following the model that the MAA’s graduate students have used so successfully at conferences.
Space City Medievalism (PI: Daniel Davies, University of Houston):
Space City Medievalism is a series of events that stage encounters between contemporary poets and medieval literature in Houston, TX. During the 2024-25 academic year, we will organize a series of workshops between scholars of medieval literature and creative writers that explore different aspects of medieval poetics. Creative writers will then create their own responses to medieval literature, ranging from translations and adaptations to pastiches and confrontations, to create original compositions that intertwine contemporary and medieval poetics. The program will culminate with a public poetry reading in April 2025 in which program participants perform their original medievalist poetry. The reading will also feature a leading poet whose practice is informed by medieval literature.
Virtual Medieval Books in the Schools (PI: Michelle Hamilton, University of Minnesota):
We (Center for Premodern Studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities) are creating online resources to complement our in-person K-12 classroom presentations on the history of the book in the Middle Ages. The Medieval Book in the Schools classroom program has been running successfully for almost twenty years (initiated by Professor Susan Noakes in 2005). Primarily a program for elementary school students, we have recently created a second
presentation aimed at high school and undergraduate students.
York Plays 2025 (PI: Matthew Sergi, University of Toronto):
On Saturday, June 7, 2025 (rain date Sunday, June 8, 2025), starting at 6:30am — and likely continuing past midnight — eighteen performance groups from across North America, organized by the Poculi ludique societas, will participate in staging all of the York Corpus Christi plays in medieval style, using Christina M. Fitzgerald’s new editions of the fifteenth-century York Register manuscript, repeating each play across four performance stations, outdoors on the University of Toronto campus (at Victoria College’s Burwash Quad).
We are very pleased to support these exciting projects. These lectures, workshops, exhibits, demonstrations, online resources, and performances will promote Medieval Studies across North America (Ontario, Massachusetts, Virginia, Indiana, Minnesota, Louisiana, Texas, and New Mexico) to audiences including K-12 students and educators, graduate students and ECRs, senior scholars, and the general public. A second round of applications will open soon.
