CARA News – Medieval Institute summary for 2019–20

The 2020–21 academic year proceeded quite differently for the Medieval Institute, as it did for everyone, yet the silver lining of Zoom meant we could offer our programming to a global audience and broaden our community in wonderful ways. We hosted and sponsored virtual lectures with Dag Nikolaus Hasse (Würzburg), “Andrea Alpago in Damascus: Politics, Medicine and Philosophy around 1517”; Warren Zev Harvey (Hebrew U of Jerusalem), “Maimonides on Legislating the Love and Awe of God”; and Hussein Fancy (U of Michigan), “The Impostor Sea: The Making of the Medieval Mediterranean,” this last one part of our annual Graduate Student Invitation Lecture Series. Our two annual colloquia, typically held in the spring, were held instead in October 2020. The 19th Annual Mellon Colloquium [https://medieval.nd.edu/news-events/annual-events/mellon-colloquium/], “Clerics, Courts, and Legal Culture in Early Medieval Italy,” featured our 2019–20 Mellon Fellow, Michael Heil (University of Arkansas, Little Rock) together with speakers Maria Cristina La Rocca (Università degli studi di Padova), Abigail Firey (University of Kentucky), and Warren C. Brown (California Institute of Technology). Our Third Annual Byzantine Postdoctoral Fellowship Workshop [https://medieval.nd.edu/news-events/annual-events/byzantine-postdoctoral-fellowship-seminar/], “Memory and Cognition in Byzantium,” featured our 2019–20 Byzantine Postdoctoral Fellow Nicole Paxton Sullo (Yale) together with speakers Rossitza Schroeder (St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary), Wiebke-Marie Stock (University of Notre Dame), and Roland Betancourt (University of California, Irvine). Our annual Conway lectures [https://medieval.nd.edu/news-events/annual-events/conway-lectures/], this year on the theme of “Race in the Middle Ages,” took a new form of three speakers plus a roundtable. We hosted virtually three distinguished speakers: Sara Lipton (Stony Brook), Cord J. Whitaker (Wellesley), and Suzanne Akbari (Institute for Advanced Study). Select recordings of these virtual lectures are available on our YouTube channel [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCeLWdfGnJuDY_A9hjHGoIag]. In the 2021–22 year the Medieval Institute will be celebrating its 75th anniversary, and we look forward to holding our 2021 Conway Lectures on both this anniversary and the 700th anniversary of the death of Dante Alighieri. You can read more about these events, our visitors, and the Institute on our website [http://medieval.nd.edu], and you can follows us on Twitter [https://twitter.com/MedievalND], Facebook [https://www.facebook.com/MedievalND], and YouTube [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCeLWdfGnJuDY_A9hjHGoIag].