The Medieval Academy Blog

Join us in Washington DC for the 98th Annual Meeting of the Medieval Academy of America. Discounted registration ends on 1 February, so register now!

The Members of the MAA 2023 Organizing Committee, including independent scholars and medievalists from over a dozen area institutions, are pleased to open registration for the 98th Annual Meeting of the Medieval Academy of America on February 23-26, 2023 in Washington, DC. The meeting will take place at the Grand Hyatt in downtown Washington with special sessions at the National Gallery of Art, the Library of Congress, The Catholic University of America, and the National Museum of Asian Art. The program draws upon the many resources in the capital region for the study of the Middle Ages in an international context, and features plenaries by Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Verena Krebs, Anne Dunlop, and MAA president Maureen C. Miller. Highlights of the meeting include a curatorial round-table on Global Medieval Art at the National Gallery of Art, the World Premiere of Rejoicing in Broken Pieces, a play about female monastic culture with playwright Allyson Currin in attendance, and a closing reception at the National Museum of Asian Art with curators on site to introduce conference attendees to the collection.

Pre-conference events include two workshops at the Textile Museum’s Avenir Center in Ashburn, Virginia, and a day-long Digital Medieval Studies Institute hosted by NYU’s DC campus (with spots still open in some sessions; more information and application portal here). Additionally, curators at Dumbarton Oaks, the National Gallery of Art, and the Textile Museum will welcome medievalists during three separate pre-conference excursions organized in anticipation of the gathering in Washington, DC.

Attendees must be fully vaccinated (or have a verified medical exemption) and must agree to abide by the Medieval Academy of America’s Professional Behavior Policy. Due to prohibitive financial and logistical constraints, this meeting will be entirely and exclusively in-person. We hope to offer a hybrid format in 2024.

For registration, hotel block information, and the full program, please visit the conference website (and check back often for updates).

To the members of the Medieval Academy of America:

I am very pleased to announce the results of the 2023 governance election:

President: Robin Fleming (Boston College, History)
1st Vice-President: Sara Lipton (Stony Brook Univ., History)
2nd Vice-President: Peggy McCracken (Univ. of Michigan, French and Comparative Literature)

Council:
Roland Betancourt (Univ. of California, Irvine, Art History)
Bonnie Effros (Univ. of British Columbia, History)
Luisa Nardini (Univ. of Texas at Austin, Musicology)
Michelle C. Wang (Georgetown Univ., Art History)

Nominating Committee:
Chair (appointed by MAA President): Jessica Brantley (Yale Univ., English)
Elected members:
Akash Kumar (Univ. of California, Berkeley, Italian Studies)
Michelle M. Sauer (Univ. of North Dakota, English)

My thanks to all who voted and to all who stood for election, and my congratulations to all who were elected.

Lisa Fagin Davis

Executive Director, Medieval Academy of America

The Medieval Academy of America invites applications for the following grants. Please note that applicants must be members in good standing as of September 15 in order to be eligible for Medieval Academy awards.

Belle Da Costa Greene Award
The Belle Da Costa Greene Award of $2,000 will be granted annually to a medievalist of color for research and travel. The award may be used to visit archives, attend conferences, or to facilitate writing and research. The award will be granted on the basis of the quality of the proposed project, the applicant’s budgetary needs (as expressed by a submitted budget and in the project narrative), and the estimation of the ways in which the award will facilitate the applicant’s research and contribute to the field. Special consideration will be given to graduate students, emerging junior scholars, adjunct, and unaffiliated scholars. Click here for more information. Click here to make a donation in support of the Greene Award. (Deadline 15 February 2023)

Olivia Remie Constable Award
Four Olivia Remie Constable Awards of $1,500 each will be granted to emerging junior faculty, adjunct or unaffiliated scholars (broadly understood: post-doctoral, pre-tenure) for research and travel. Click here for more information. (Deadline 15 February 2023)

MAA Dissertation Grants:
The nine annual Medieval Academy Dissertation Grants support advanced graduate students who are writing Ph.D. dissertations on medieval topics. The $2,000 grants help defray research expenses. Click here for more information. (Deadline 15 February 2023)

Schallek Awards
The five annual Schallek awards support graduate students conducting doctoral research in any relevant discipline dealing with late-medieval Britain (ca. 1350-1500). The $2,000 awards help defray research expenses. Click here for more information. (Deadline 15 February 2023)

MAA/GSC Grant for Innovation in Community-Building and Professionalization
The MAA/GSC Grant(s) will be awarded to an individual or graduate student group from one or more universities. The purpose of this grant is to stimulate new and innovative efforts that support pre-professionalization, encourage communication and collaboration across diverse groups of graduate students, and build communities amongst graduate student medievalists. Click here for more information. (Deadline 15 February 2023)

Applicants for these and other MAA programs must be members in good standing of the Medieval Academy. Please contact the Executive Director for more information about these and other MAA programs.

The Medieval Academy of America invites proposals for sessions at the upcoming annual meeting of the American Historical Association in San Francisco, January 4-7, 2024. Each year the Medieval Academy co-sponsors sessions at the AHA’s annual meeting. This year, we aim to sponsor sessions that address an overarching theme of interest both to MAA members and broader audiences:

“Representing Medieval Voices: Current Approaches and Methodologies”. Click here for more information and to submit a proposal.

We are very pleased to announce that the 2023-2024 Schallek Fellowship has been awarded to Amy Juarez (Univ. of California, Riverside) to support her dissertation research. In her words:

“My dissertation, entitled ‘The Poetics of Embodied Architecture in Medieval and Early Modern Europe,’ takes as its central concern how Vitruvian craft undergirds late-medieval and early modern conceptions of embodiment, and how writers from these periods use these ideologies in and through their own literary discourses. My project argues that the ‘Vitruvian Man’ is the basis for more complex and nuanced depictions of the body-as-building dynamic than previously understood in late-medieval and early modern cultures from the twelfth to sixteenth centuries. Accordingly, this dissertation explores four modes of Vitruvian technology in literary texts, tying theories of architectural embodiment to ekphrastic encounters, to microarchitectural experiences, to humoral diagnoses, and to a miniaturized version of the ‘Vitruvian Man’ himself. Literary representations of these four processes make visible a deep interest in Vitruvius’s ancient philosophies in the medieval and early modern periods; at the same time they simultaneously complicate Vitruvian notions of architecture as an embodied form of expression. As my project will show, Vitruvian craft, or techne, is more than mere metaphor in medieval and early modern poetry; in fact, the Vitruvian Virtues are evoked as real architectural tropes in rhetorical practices from these periods.”

The Schallek Fellowship provides a one-year grant of $30,000 to support Ph.D. dissertation research in any relevant discipline dealing with late-medieval Britain (ca. 1350-1500). The Fellowship is adjudicated by the MAA’s Schallek Committee and is jointly sponsored by the Medieval Academy and The Richard III Society-American Branch, made possible by a gift to the Richard III Society from William B. and Maryloo Spooner Schallek.