The Medieval Academy Blog

Under warm and sunny skies the Medieval Academy met for its 87th Annual Meeting in St. Louis, Missouri from 22-24 March 2012. The meeting was a busy and energetic gathering and offered fifty sessions, approximately 380 registered attendants, three plenary speakers (Caroline Bruzelius, Alice-Mary Talbot, and William Chester Jordan), and a CARA Plenary Session. The meeting’s interests were wide-ranging, from medieval piety to Irish and crusades studies and Byzantine topics. The receptions, banquet and business meeting were all well attended and at last count attendance was higher than anticipated. The meeting was hosted by the St. Louis University Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Our thanks to Tom Madden, Teresa Harvey, staff and grad students for a wonderful meeting. A full report will be published in the July issue of Speculum.

Photo: The Haskins Medal. The Medieval Academy of America

The 2012 Haskins Medal was presented to Richard William Pfaff for his magnum opus, The Liturgy in Medieval England: A History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). The committee wrote that this work “represents the sum of a life’s work dedicated to the recovery and analysis of the sources for the first comprehensive account of the liturgy in medieval England, from early Anglo-Saxon origins right up until the Reformation.” President Alice-Mary Talbot presented Prof. Pfaff with the gold medal, which was designed in 1939 by Graham Carey. Jeffrey F. Hamburger (Chair), Dyan H. Elliott, and Jennifer Summit served on the 2012 committee.

Christopher MacEvitt, associate professor in the Department of Religion at Dartmouth College, was the recipient of the John Nicholas Brown Prize for 2012 for his work, The Crusades and the Christian World of the East: Rough Tolerance (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), which successfully introduces a new paradigm for the relations of the crusaders with indigenous Christians in the twelfth-century Levant. The committee for 2012 included Robert Nelson (Chair), Sara Lipton, and Paolo Squatriti. President Alice-Mary Talbot presented the award.

Lee Manion was awarded the 2012 Van Courtlandt Elliott Prize for his article “The Loss of the Holy Land and Sir Isumbras: Literary Contributions to Fourteenth-Century Crusade Discourse,” Speculum 85 (2010): 65-90. Deborah Deliyannis, chair of the selection committee, presented the award to Dr. Manion, assistant professor of English at Stern College for Women. His study “stood out for its interdisciplinary range, and for the implications of his conclusions that crusading ideals permeated late-medieval culture far beyond clerical and military circles.” Joel Kaye and Deborah McGrady also served on this committee.

The Student Travel Fund Bursary made grants to six graduate students who presented papers at the Annual Meeting: Samantha Katz (Yale), Andrew Kraebel (Yale), Brendan Sullivan (NYU), Kristine Tanton (USC), Bridget Whearty (Stanford) and Barbara Zimbalist (UC Davis).

Two medievalists are among the nine recipients of the ACLS 2012 Digital Innovation Fellowships.

Margot Fassler Photo courtesy of ACLS

Margot Fassler (Professor, Theology and Music, University of Notre Dame) will create a digitized, sounding model of Hildegard of Bingen’s conception of the cosmos, employing the advanced technology of Notre Dame’s Digital Visualization Theater.

Massimo Lollini Photo courtesy of ACLS

Massimo Lollini (Professor, Romance Languages, University of Oregon) will make Petrarch’s early manuscripts available to scholars online via an interface that provides new tools for rich linking and layering of texts as well as visualizations of documents.

Other projects of interest to medievalists include Assistant Professor Jesse Rodin’s Josquin Research Project (Stanford University) on new tools for making Renaissance music searchable; and three GIS projects covering Rome, Saqqara (Egypt), and the North Atlantic.

These fellows will spend a year dedicated to a major scholarly project intended to advance digital humanistic scholarship by broadening understanding of its nature and exemplifying the robust infrastructure necessary for creating such works. These projects span disciplines and methodologies, but all create new means of scholarly investigation and sharing. For more information see http://www.acls.org/programs/digital/.

Sign up for the Chronicle of Higher Education Newsletter for Grad Students with news and advice on surviving graduate school — from planning your dissertation to navigating the job market. (http://chronicle.com/section/Newsletters/85).