The Medieval Academy Blog

CALL FOR PAPERS
Tenth Annual Symposium on Medieval and Renaissance Studies
June 12-14, 2023
Saint Louis University
St. Louis, Missouri

The Tenth Annual Symposium on Medieval and Renaissance Studies (June 12-14, 2023) is a convenient summer venue in North America for scholars to present papers, organize sessions, participate in roundtables, and engage in interdisciplinary discussion. The goal of the Symposium is to promote serious scholarly investigation into all topics and in all disciplines of medieval and Renaissance studies.

The plenary speakers for this year will be Uta-Renate Blumenthal, of the Catholic University of America, and Lia Markey, of the Newberry Library, Chicago.

The Symposium is held annually on the beautiful midtown St. Louis campus of Saint Louis University. On campus housing options include affordable, air-conditioned apartments as well as a more luxurious hotel. Inexpensive meal plans are also available, although there is a wealth of restaurants, bars, and cultural venues within easy walking distance of campus.

While attending the Symposium, participants are free to use the Vatican Film Library, the Rare Books Division, and the general collection at Saint Louis University’s Pius XII Memorial Library. These collections offer access to tens of thousands of medieval and early modern manuscripts on microfilm as well as strong holdings in medieval and Renaissance history, literature, languages, manuscript studies, theology, philosophy, and canon law. The Jesuit Archives & Research Center is adjacent to the university and also accessible to Symposium attendees.

The Tenth Annual Symposium on Medieval and Renaissance Studies invites proposals for papers, complete sessions, and roundtables. Any topics regarding the scholarly investigation of the medieval and early modern world are welcome. Papers are normally twenty minutes each and sessions are scheduled for ninety minutes. Scholarly organizations are especially encouraged to sponsor proposals for complete sessions, and organizing at least two sessions in coordination with each other is highly recommended.

Submission are currently open and the dealine for all proposals is December 31, 2023. Decisions will be made by the end of January and the final program will be published in March.

For more information or to submit your proposal online go to: https://www.smrs-slu.org/.

The Medieval Academy of America Centennial Special Issue
to be published in Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies.
Proposals due October 15

Editors: Karla Mallette (University of Michigan)
and Roland Betancourt (University of California, Irvine)

Founded in 1925, the Medieval Academy of America has served as a gathering space for scholars of the Middle Ages to forge new directions and collaborations across disciplines and subfields. In recent decades, the purview of the medieval has expanded to take on a global perspective, broadening the remit of our organization, and urging medievalists to rethink our place–in territorial and temporal terms–in the academy. The contributions of feminism, queer theory, trans studies, critical race theory, and indigenous studies have further redefined how we approach the medieval world and its peoples. Our own positionality–in systems of gender and race identity and as scholars working in North America, a continent excluded from the “medieval” by traditional historiography–inflects our scholarship in crucial ways. These observations lead us to ask, what is the role of our institutions–departments and disciplines, professional and social organizations, the guilds of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries–in the practices of knowledge making?

To mark the Medieval Academy of America’s centennial in 2025, Speculum invites articles for a special issue that reflect on the history of Medieval Studies in North America and its institutions. In this dedicated issue, we wish to address how schools, universities, libraries, archival repositories, professional societies, amateur organizations, and other para-academic and non-academic groups have organized and constructed the limits and articulations of our knowledge. How has Medieval Studies been shaped by its institutions? How have para-academic groups subverted and modeled new ways of maneuvering around conventional spaces? How has an evolving sense of community and belonging formulated and challenged many of the methods, theories, and interventions that have redefined our understanding of the Middle Ages? In the era of social media and social distancing, how have our online platforms provided added modes of collaboration, critique, and activism that have dared to imagine new horizons for the undertaking of our work and for the audiences that our research can reach?

The editors encourage a variety of approaches, including conventional studies on medieval materials that reflect on the state of the field and historiographic essays that consider the development of methodologies, intellectual communities, or critical figures in our disciplines. All contributions, however, should be written as timely interventions in and provocations to Medieval Studies. The editors are happy to consider proposals that break with some of the more established modes of academic writing. We encourage collaboration and will be happy to consider co- or multi-authored articles, and shorter interventions in addition to long-form articles. The editors are particularly interested in works that think critically and expansively about the terms medieval, academy, and America.

Please make sure to note the scale of your proposed contribution, authors, as well as any unique requirements or ideas. All contributions will be double-blind peer reviewed. Please submit a 500-word abstract of your proposed article and a current CV to Roland Betancourt (roland.betancourt@uci.edu) and Karla Mallette (alrak@umich.edu), with the subject line, “MAA Special Issue,” no later than 15 October 2022.