2017-18 was a busy and productive year as usual for the Medieval Institute at the University of Notre Dame. In addition to our full slate of lectures and events, we hosted several major conferences, including “New Visions of Medieval History: A Conference in Celebration of John Van Engen’s Retirement,” the “Medieval Jewish World Conference: Jewish Life in the Medieval Christian and Muslim Worlds,” the Aquinas and the Arabs International Annual Fall Meeting, and the Winter 2018 Mediterranean Seminar Workshop, “The Uses of Memory in the Pre-Modern Mediterranean.” Particularly noteworthy was our February Roundtable and Reception in Honor of Olivia Remie Constable, the Institute’s Robert M. Conway Director from 2008 until her untimely passing in 2014. The roundtable brought together several of her former students and the editor of her final book, To Live Like a Moor: Christian Perceptions of Muslim Identity in Medieval and Early Modern Spain, published in January 2018 by the University of Pennsylvania Press. The Institute also welcomed Prof. Susan Rankin (Cambridge) as its 2017 Annual Conway Lecturer; she delivered a slate of lectures in October under the series title “Carolingian Transformations.” In April the year’s Mellon Fellow, Taylor Cowdery (U of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), presented his book manuscript, “Matter and Form in Late Medieval Literature: English Poetry and Poetics, 1300-1550,” at the annual Mellon Colloquium. The Fellow invites three external respondents; joining this year were Christopher Cannon (Johns Hopkins), Michelle Karnes (Notre Dame), and D. Vance Smith (Princeton). The Institute also welcomed its first annual Byzantine Fellow, Lee Mordechai, and hosted as well a number of distinguished research visitors.
In 2018-19 we look forward to having Niklaus Largier (Berkeley) as our Conway lecturer and Stephen Ogden (Catholic U of America) as our Mellon Fellow.
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], andYouTube [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCeLWdfGnJuDY_A9hjHGoIag?reload=9].
