The Medieval Academy Blog

Dear MAA Members,

As I write, in early February, medievalists from across North America and from abroad are registering for the upcoming Annual Meeting hosted by the University of Virginia in Charlottesville (March 10-13, 2022), and I encourage as many of you as are able to participate in this fully hybrid conference.

I want to thank the organizing committee led by Deborah McGrady, Bruce Holsinger and Eric Ramirez-Weaver, for collaborating with medievalists from across the state of Virginia in crafting a program that is truly representative of the diversity of our membership and offers the broadest range of topics as well as approaches in medieval studies. The thematic strands that are used to index the various sessions in the program give a good sense of the range: political medievalism; passion and the emotions; gender and identities; queering the medieval; Inter-religious coexistence and conflict; medieval materialisms, interreligious coexistence and conflict; race and its intersections; medieval disability/disabilities; plague and pandemic, vulnerability and the ethics of care; and environment and ecology, political medievalism, rethinking the global medieval; trade and cultural exchange revelation and reason in medieval science; pedagogies: material, digital, embodied. The conference is also notable for the geographic reach of its topics moving well beyond the traditional borders of medieval Europe and the Mediterranean to include papers on medieval China, Islam, and Nubia. In addition, there are panels and roundtables focused on professional development, on pedagogy, mentoring, and sharing graduate student research online.

I would like to highlight the two distinguished plenary addresses which explicitly address the fraught and highly politicized times we must negotiate as scholars of the Middle Ages: Roland Betancourt (Associate Professor of Art History at UC-Irvine) “The Allure of Secrecy and the Challenge of History: Crafting the Middle Ages in an Era of Conspiracy and Radicalization” and Seeta Chaganti (Professor of English, University of California, Davis) “Charlottesville and the Liberalism of Medieval Studies.” The conference responds to the moment we live in another way with a plenary round table on “Medieval Studies for the Modern Age: New Approaches to Medicine, Disease, and Health” featuring contributions by Hannah Barker, Meg Leja, Alex More and Sharon De Witte with Monica Green as discussant.

The Annual Meeting promises to promote a nuanced understanding of a culturally complex, multifaceted, global medieval world that stands in sharp contrast to the medievalisms that are too often presented either by popular culture or by those fringe groups in the US and Europe who have recently misconstrued the Middle Ages for racist purposes.

I look forward to seeing many of you at Charlottesville meeting either in person or virtually.

Keep well and safe travels!
Thomas E. A. Dale, President of the Medieval Academy of America

General registration is now open for virtual attendance at the 2022 Annual Meeting of the Medieval Academy of America, to be held March 10-13 on the grounds of the University of Virginia and online. Due to the overwhelming response by those on the program, we been forced to limit registration for in-person attendance to speakers, presiders, and officers, staff, and incoming Fellows of the Academy. While this will come as a disappointment to many of our colleagues, on-site institutional constraints during the pandemic have required us to cap the total number of in-person attendees at 175. Virtual participation, however, is available to the entire membership, and we hope that members will take some consolation in the hybrid format of this year’s Annual Meeting as a promise of larger gatherings in years to come. Click here to register.

Please contact the Program Committee <MAA2022cville@gmail.com> with questions. Check this page regularly for updates and for a PDF of the program: https://www.medievalacademy.org/page/2022AnnualMeeting

We look forward to seeing you in Charlottesville, whether in-person or online!

98th Annual Meeting of the Medieval Academy of America
The Grand Hyatt, Washington, DC
23-26 February, 2023

The 98th Annual Meeting of the Medieval Academy of America will take place at the Grand Hyatt Washington in downtown Washington, DC. The meeting is jointly hosted by the Medieval Academy of America and a consortium of medievalists from DC, Northern Virginia, and Maryland.

The conference program will feature sessions highlighting innovative scholarship across the many disciplines contributing to medieval studies. The Program Committee invites proposals for papers on all topics and in all disciplines and periods of medieval studies and medievalism, including on the themes and strands proposed below. 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 will be given to individuals whose field would not normally involve membership in the Medieval Academy. We are particularly interested in receiving submissions from those working outside of traditional academic positions, including independent scholars, emeritus or adjunct faculty, university administrators, those working in cultural heritage institutions (libraries, archives, museums, scholarly societies, or cultural research centers), editors and publishers, and other fellow medievalists. The Program Committee seeks to construct a program that fully reflects and expands the diversity of the Medieval Academy’s membership with respect to research areas and representation.

Plenary addresses will be delivered by Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Professor of Medieval Studies, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton; Anne Dunlop, Herald Chair of Fine Arts at the University of Melbourne; and Maureen Miller, Professor of History, University of California, Berkeley, and incoming president of the Academy.

Click here for the full call for papers.

The Medieval Academy of America congratulates the winners of the
2022 Medieval Academy of America Publication Prizes:

Haskins Medal: Marina Rustow, The Lost Archive: Traces of a Caliphate in a Cairo Synagogue (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020)

Karen Gould Prize in Art History: Joan Holladay, Genealogy and the Politics of Representation in the High and Late Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019)

As part of the GSC’s ongoing efforts to think creatively about increasing accessibility of the wider public to the knowledge that we, as scholars of the Middle Ages, are producing, five special 2022 Community-Building Awards have been granted in support of these projects:

“Living with the Medieval and Letting it Live: High Schoolers and Historical Learning at the Sheesh Mahal, Delhi” (Anurag Advani, Aparajita Das, Sonia Wigh, Sourav Ghosh)

“Coding Codices” (Aylin Malcolm, Tessa Gengnagel, and Caitlin Postal)

“The Medievalist Toolkit” (Claire Dillon, Carly Quijano, Sam Dobberstein, Sarina Kuersteiner, Adam Matthews, and Robin Reich)

“Meeting in the Middle Ages Podcast” (Will Beattie and Benjamin Pykare)

“Middle School Paleography Workshop” (Rosann Marie Gage and Lanson Wells)

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

For Medievalists of Color:

Belle Da Costa Greene Award

The Belle Da Costa Greene Award of $2,000 will be granted annually to a member of the Medieval Academy of America 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 2022)

For Independent Scholars and ECRs:

Olivia Remie Constable Awards

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 2022)

For Graduate Students:

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 2022)

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 2022)

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 2022)

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 Book Subvention Program provides grants of up to $2,500 to university or other non-profit scholarly presses to support the publication of first books by Medieval Academy members. Click here for more information.

The Medieval Academy Inclusivity and Diversity Book Subvention Program provides subventions of up to $5,000 to university or other non-profit scholarly presses to support the publication of books concerning the study of inclusivity and diversity in the Middle Ages (broadly conceived) by Medieval Academy members. Click here for more information.

Applications for subventions will be accepted only from the publisher and only for books that have already been approved for publication. Eligible Academy members who wish to have their books considered for a subvention should ask their publishers to apply directly to the Academy, following the guidelines outlined on the relevant webpage. The deadline for proposals is 1 May 2021.

Dear colleagues,

Interested in getting better acquainted with the grants writing process? We want to invite you to a Grants Writing Workshop organized by the Graduate Student Committee. Join us on February 25, from 12pm-2pm (EST). You can register for the event here. The event is open to all. Help us spread the word.

Speakers:
Elina Gertsman
Marcia Kupfer
Roger Martínez-Dávila
Sebastian Sobecki
Mark Cruse

Best,

Jonathan Correa and Reed O’Mara

REMINDER: DEADLINE TO REGISTER AS A MENTOR OR MENTEE:
Wednesday, February 18th

*Please note that since the 97th Annual Meeting of the Medieval Academy of America will be conducted in a hybrid format due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we will be running the mentorship program virtually. Because of this, anybody can participate, regardless of their MAA Annual Meeting attendance plans*

The Graduate Student Committee (GSC) of the Medieval Academy of America invites both those attending the 97th Annual Meeting of the Medieval Academy of America, hosted by the University of Virginia (March 10- 13), as well as any other interested medievalists to participate in the GSC Mentoring Program.

The GSC Mentoring Program facilitates networking between graduate students or early career scholars and more established scholars by pairing students and scholars according to common interest or academic discipline.

Mentorship exchanges are intended to help students establish professional contacts with scholars who can offer them career advice. The primary objective of this exchange is for the relationship to be active during the conference, though mentors and mentees are encouraged to continue communication after a conference has ended.

We have recorded an increased interest in the GSC Mentorship Program since it has been held virtually due to COVID-19 restrictions. We will attempt to match all those who register as a mentee with mentors; however, if need be, preference will be granted in order of form submission.

To volunteer as a mentor (faculty, librarians, curators, independent scholars) or to sign up as a mentee, please submit the online form, linked here, by Wednesday, February 18th.

On behalf of the committee, thank you and our best,

Mary M. Alcaro& Lauren Van Nest
2021-2022 Mentoring Program Coordinators