The Medieval Academy Blog

Dear Academy Members,

Welcome to summer. For those who teach in the Northern Hemisphere, congratulations for making it through another academic year. And for medievalists both inside and outside the academy, I hope that the longer days, warmer weekends, and vacation days provide us all with the opportunity to read outside our fields, spend a couple of hours contemplating medieval objects in a local museum, or to travel to medieval sites and archives.

Before everyone disappears into their summers, I want to draw your attention to two pieces of essential reading––the MAA’s report on academic positions in medieval studies and a call for papers.

The report comes out of a proposal made in 2020 by the Ad Hoc Committee on Professional Diversity to gather data on the medieval job market. The new report is based on job data collected and analyzed by Merle Eisenberg, of Oklahoma State University, with help from Laura Ingallinella, Skyler Anderson, Jonathan Henry, and Cate Kurtz. Thanks to their hard work, we now have seven years of data on tenure-track jobs (2015–16 to 2022–3) in History, English, Islamic Studies, Italian Studies, Art History, and Religious Studies/Theology. The data confirms what many of us suspected: academic employment for medievalists with Ph.D.s has narrowed considerably over the past decade, the job market for medievalists has not returned to its pre-Covid levels, and tenure-track positions across disciplines are disappearing. Merle’s report is essential reading for anyone who teaches graduate students or who is a graduate student. It underscores how important it is that Ph.D. programs train their students for a broad array of careers and that we all need to continue working to ensure that medievalists outside the academy can remain active in the field after they have written their dissertations. The future of the study of the Middle Ages depends on it!

The second piece of essential reading is the call for papers for the 99th Medieval Academy Annual Meeting, which will be held at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana, on March 14–16, 2024.

The themes of the upcoming conference are “Mapping the Middle Ages,” “Bodies in Motion,” and “Communities of Knowledge.” It is going to be a terrific meeting with excellent papers, exciting off-program activities, and a lot of time for conversation. Please consider submitting a proposal for an individual paper or a complete panel. The deadline is 15 June.

Robin Fleming, President of the Medieval Academy of America

If you’re going to be at the Leeds International Medieval Congress this year, please join us on Tuesday, 4 July, 19.00-20.00 (Session 901) for the Annual Medieval Academy of America Lecture, “Somatic Entanglements,” to be delivered by Prof. Elina Gertsman (Department of Art History & Art, Case Western Reserve University, Ohio). Afterwards, join Prof. Gertsman and MAA governance and staff members for the Medieval Academy’s open-bar wine reception.

The Medieval Academy’s Graduate Student Committee roundtable will take place Monday, 3 July, 19:00-20:00 (Session 445): “The International Medievalist: Perspectives on Researching, Teaching, and Networking in the Age of Globalisation. Participants include Muntazir Ali (University of Delhi / Archaeological Survey of India), Elizabeth Liendo (Guilford College / Shanghai School International Division), and Özlem Eren (University of Wisconsin-Madison).

We hope to see you there!

99th Annual Meeting of the Medieval Academy of America
University of Notre Dame
14-16 March 2024

The 99th Annual Meeting of the Medieval Academy of America will take place on the campus of the University of Notre Dame (South Bend, Indiana). The meeting is hosted by The Medieval Institute, St. Mary’s College, Holy Cross College, and Indiana University, South Bend.

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 can be given to individuals whose specialty would not normally involve membership in the Medieval Academy.

Conference themes include Mapping the Middle Ages; Bodies in Motion; and Communities of Knowledge. In addition, we welcome innovative proposals that cross traditional disciplinary boundaries or that use various disciplinary approaches to examine an individual topic. We encourage papers on Asia, Africa, the Middle East, or Eastern Europe and the networks and exchanges between East and West.

See this page for more information and the full Call for Papers:

https://www.medievalacademy.org/page/2024AnnualMeeting

MAA Publication Subventions have been awarded to Anito Savo, Portraying Authorship: Juan Manuel and the Rhetoric of Authority (University of Toronto Press) and Jenna Phillips, Seductions of War and the Dream of Solace in Thirteenth-Century France (Stanford University Press). We are very pleased to support the publication of these monographs.

MAA Travel Grants have been awarded to Wendy Pfeffer (“Conseils dans le genre d’ensenhamen: la Diététique provençale/ Adding the Dietétique provençale to the Ensenhamen Corpus,” XIVe Congrès de l’Association Internationale d’Études Occitanes, Munich) and Caroline Solazzo (“Gilding Textiles: New Archaeological Evidence and Scientific Developments on the Production of Metal Threads,” European Association of Archaeologists, Belfast). Congratulations!

Speculations
The Centennial Issue of Speculum
January 2026

The centenary of a scholarly journal offers the opportunity to recognize, reflect on, and reimagine scholarly methods and objects, including canonicity and the discursive possibilities of scholarship; the boundaries, borders and spaces that define our disciplines; the genres and taxonomies that shape our work.

To mark the 100th anniversary of Speculum, we aim to commemorate the journal by raising questions about the methods and parameters of our study in a prospective rather than retrospective manner. What might the future of medieval studies look like? What might the place of this journal in that future be? The volume focuses on the future of the journal and the field it helps to define by inviting a wide breadth of scholarship that can collectively speculate about how we can take medieval studies into the future. But of course those living in the medieval world broadly considered speculated on their future as well. How was the future conceived in the past and what might those past reflections about the future, and about the condition of futurity generally, have to teach us as we consider recent shifts in our field and a shifting institutional context.

The format of the centennial volume will model the kind of contributions we seek: instead of 4-5 long form articles, we plan to publish 50 short essays (of approximately 3000 words each) in an attempt to represent a broader range of voices, perspectives, methodologies, and areas of study. We welcome traditional essays as well as innovative forms of research and reflection (pedagogical speculations, creative or dialogic writing, speculative history, etc.).

We invite contributions that speculate on the past and future of scholarly work in medieval studies. We particularly welcome essays that address gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and that use comparative and interdisciplinary methods and that address at least one of the following questions:

• What kinds of methods and theoretical models shape our work and will orient us in the future?
• How might we call on more inclusive and expansive understandings of the Middle Ages in light of the global turn and critical reappraisals of periodization.
• What histories do we examine, what histories do we obscure, and what criteria will most productively guide our examination of histories in the future?
• How have scholarly understandings of medieval historicity and temporality shaped the parameters of our inquiry, and how might we critically engage these accounts?

Proposals of 300 words should be sent to speculations@themedievalacademy.org by December 1, 2023.

Speculations editorial collective
Mohamad Ballan
Peggy McCracken
Cecily Hilsdale
Katherine Jansen
Sierra Lomuto
Cord J. Whitaker

Olga Bush (Vassar College) was awarded the 2023 ICMA–Samuel H. Kress Foundation Research and Publication Grant to support on-site research in Spain and Sicily for her project entitled “Forced Labor: Exotic Fauna in the Animation of Medieval Court Environments.” She was also was appointed a Fellow in Garden and Landscape Studies at Dumbarton Oaks for the 2023-2024 academic year to support research on her project titled “Extraction and Construction: The Ecology and Landscape Architecture of Madīnat al-Zahrā’ (Córdoba) in the Pan-Mediterranean Medieval Context” that forms a part of her monograph in progress at the intersection of environmental studies and medieval Muslim visual culture.

Lauren Van Nest (University of Virginia) has been awarded a Kress Two-Year Institutional Fellowship in the History of Art at the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich, Germany for 2023-2025. This fellowship supports research on my dissertation “Sacral Performance & Extended Royal Bodies in the Ottonian Empire: The Case of Henry II & Kunigunde (1002-1024).”

Congratulations! If you have good news to share, please send it to Executive Director Lisa Fagin Davis.