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.
