The Medieval Academy Blog

We are very pleased to announce that the Medieval Academy of America has received an Intention Foundry Learned Society Extended Engagement Microgrant from the American Council of Learned Societies. The grant will fund a series of summer webinars to promote the work of scholars and scholarship honored by our five Inclusivity & Diversity (I&D) Awards in 2025: the I&D Publication Subvention, the I&D Research Grant, the I&D Travel Grant, the Article Prize in CRT, and the Belle da Costa Greene Award. These five prizes support work that expands the traditional boundaries of Medieval Studies through engagement with Critical Race Studies, Disability Studies, Queer Studies, and the Global Medieval, among other methodologies. In addition, the Belle da Costa Greene Award explicitly supports scholars of Color. We will publish the schedule for these webinars in the coming weeks. Click here for more information about the Intention Foundry program.

The Mary Jaharis Center for Byzantine Art and Culture and the Mashtots Professor of Armenian Studies at Harvard University are pleased to announce the next lecture in the 2024–2025 East of Byzantium lecture series.

Tuesday, March 25, 2025 | 12:00 PM (EDT, UTC -4) | Zoom
Saints of Dayr al-Naqlun: Fragments of Devotional Life in the Medieval Egyptian Countryside
Lev Weitz, Catholic University of America

Arabic and Coptic documents dug up on the edge of the Egyptian desert give unparalleled views into the history of medieval Islamic Egypt’s peasants, villagers, and tribespeople—the majority of the population of any pre-modern society, but often invisible in grand historical narratives. Such documents have typically been used to study social and economic history, but what can they tell us of ritual and devotional life? This talk brings together documentary sources with archaeological and art-historical evidence from Dayr al-Naqlun, a monastery in Egypt’s Fayyum Oasis, to explore the distinctive ritual practices of Coptic Christianity in the rural hinterland of the Fatimid Caliphate.

Lev Weitz is associate professor of history at the Catholic University of America, Washington, DC. A historian of the Islamic Middle East, his scholarly interests lie in the encounters among Muslims, Christians, and Jews that have shaped the region’s history from the coming of Islam to the present. He is the author of Between Christ and Caliph: Law, Marriage, and Christian Community in Early Islam (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018).

Advance registration required. Register: https://eastofbyzantium.org/upcoming-events/

Contact Brandie Ratliff (mjcbac@hchc.edu), Director, Mary Jaharis Center for Byzantine Art and Culture with any questions.

An East of Byzantium lecture. EAST OF BYZANTIUM is a partnership between the Mashtots Professor of Armenian Studies at Harvard University and the Mary Jaharis Center that explores the cultures of the eastern frontier of the Byzantine empire in the late antique and medieval periods.