Alexandre Roberts, University of Southern California, has been awarded an NEH Fellowship to support his project, “Matter Redeemed: Physics and Alchemy in Byzantium and the Islamic World” (research and writing leading to a book on physics and alchemy in the medieval Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East).
Congratulations! If you have good news to share, please send it to Executive Director Lisa Fagin Davis.
BSA Seeks a New Editor for PBSA
March 2, 2021
The Bibliographical Society of America (BSA) seeks a new Editor or co-Editors of the Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America (PBSA). The Editor is responsible for the editorial direction of the journal, which serves to fulfill the mission of the BSA to foster the study of the material text.
The Editor is appointed for an expected three-year term, with the option to renew. The expectation is that this position is part time, about 10 hours weekly. Terms and conditions are to be negotiated, as is the physical location of the Editor or team. A full job description is available here.
Click here for more information.
Monica H. Green will be delivering the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine Centre for History in Public Health Annual Lecture on the theme of “A New Past for a Pandemic Future: Evolutionary and Cultural Histories of Infectious Diseases.” The lecture will take place virtually, via Zoom, at 17.30 (5:30pm) GMT, on Tuesday, 16 March 2021. Further details can be found at https://www.lshtm.ac.uk/newsevents/events/new-past-pandemic-future-evolutionary-and-cultural-histories-infectious-diseases. For any accessibility requirements, please get in touch with the event contact.
The Lillian Goldman Law Library at Yale Law School has an exciting opportunity for a Rare Book Librarian. This position oversees and promotes the use of rare books and understanding of legal history through collection development and management, preservation activities, exhibits, publications, instruction, and participation in Law Library reference and public service activities.
Yale is a fantastic place to work. The work is challenging, fun, and extremely rewarding. We have an amazing group of brilliant, hard-working, diverse, and collegial colleagues who hail from all over the country and the world, in fact. Yale benefits are superb, and we support and encourage new ideas, innovative activities, and significant professional development.
Inquiries should be directed to Dawn Smith, Chair of the Search Committee, at dawn.smith@yale.edu.
Application instructions and a detailed explanation of the position can be found here:
http://bit.ly/YaleCareers-64066BR
“On Being Conquered in Byzantium” Virtual Symposium
Date: April 16-17, 2021 at 9am EST
The famous adage that history is written by the victors may have become a truism, but the voices of conquered people have never been fully silenced—rather, we may not have been interested in hearing them. All too often, historiography (by no means limited to Byzantine studies) has focused on great-man histories, impersonal studies of societies, or the “longue durée,” all modes that diminish the importance of subjective individual experiences of people who were not great or who were not men.
This symposium therefore aims to refocus the collective scholarly gaze of Byzantinists away from the victors in war and toward the vanquished; away from heroes and rulers and toward victims and casualties; away from the political, economic, historical, and social causes of war and toward the personal and subjective experience of it; away from the insistence of dominant voices and toward the recuperation of marginalized ones.
Bringing together twelve specialists in literature, history, art history, and contemporary cultural theory, this symposium seeks to better understand both how Byzantines themselves understood being conquered and, as importantly, what being conquered in Byzantium can mean for us now.
Free and open to the public. Register here.
Dumbarton Oaks Virtual Museum Study Day
Deadline: March 28, 2021
How did objects convey information about individuals and society in Late Antiquity and Byzantium? Much like today, people of these periods carefully constructed their public personas through textiles, jewelry, seals, and other artifacts. This workshop will consider how modern-day notions of identity apply to premodern concepts of individuals’ relationships to their broader social, religious, gender, ethnic, and official communities. In addition, we will discuss the pragmatic challenges of displaying objects associated with individuals in museum contexts.
This year’s Dumbarton Oaks Museum Study Day will go virtual. We can accommodate up to 12 graduate students in art history, archaeology, history, classics, religious studies, and other fields who might benefit from close engagement with our collections and from training in material culture approaches.
To apply, please submit a CV and cover letter with a brief summary of the candidate’s research interests, plans for future research, and an explanation of why attendance is important to the candidate’s intellectual and professional development. All materials should be submitted to byzantine@doaks.org.
DEADLINE TO REGISTER AS A MENTOR OR MENTEE:
March 18, 2021
*Please note that since the 96th Annual Meeting will be conducted virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we will be running the mentorship program digitally. Because of this, anybody can participate, regardless of their 2021 Annual Meeting attendance plans*
The Graduate Student Committee (GSC) of the Medieval Academy of America invites those attending the 96th Annual Meeting of the Medieval Academy of America, jointly hosted by the Medieval Academy of America and the Medieval Studies Institute of the Indiana University (15-18 April 2021) and any other interested medievalists to participate in the GSC Virtual Mentoring Program. The GSC Mentoring Program facilitates networking between graduate students or early career scholars and established scholars by pairing student and scholar according to 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 that the relationship be active during the conference, although mentors and mentees sometimes decide 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 to those in order of form submission and any surplus will be given priority for the next GSC Mentoring Program (Virtual Kalamazoo 10-15 May 2021).
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 18 March 2021.
On behalf of the committee, thank you and our best,
Julia King & Lauren Van Nest
2020-2021 Mentoring Program Coordinators
Post-Doctoral Scholar
College of Arts and Sciences
University of Kentucky
The College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, KY invites applications for a post-doctoral scholar in the field of Catholic Studies. This position will begin in August 2021 and is possibly renewable for one year. Applicants must have Ph.D. in hand, having completed a dissertation related to some aspect of Church History, Catholic art, Catholic architecture, Catholic music, Catholic liturgy, Catholicism and literature, the sociology of Catholicism, the anthropology of Catholic communities, gender and Catholicism, Catholic Philosophy, Jewish-Catholic relations, Islamic-Catholic relations, Catholic mission history, Catholicism in Latin American society or politics, Catholicism in China or Japan, Biblical Studies, Catholicism and the environment, or another field centered on Catholic tradition, experience, or impact. The position carries a 2-2 teaching load, for some combination of existing courses in the catalogue and courses proposed by the Scholar. The Scholar will also work with the Director of World Religions and other faculty on future curricular development and public programming to be implemented during the year of the appointment. It is expected that the Scholar will be in residence and available for in-person teaching.
Interested applicants should apply online at: https://ukjobs.uky.edu/postings/317513. Applications should include: 1.) a brief description of research interests (upload as Specific Request 1); 2.) a brief one paragraph description of the elements you would include in one of the existing Christianity or Methodology courses, listed at worldreligions.as.uky.edu/minor (upload as Specific Request 2); 3.) brief proposals (one paragraph for each) for two additional courses in Catholic Studies or Religious Studies (upload as Specific Request 3); 4.) a title and short abstract for a public lecture you would like to give in a “Catholicism and…” series (upload as Writing Sample); 5.) a one-paragraph description of a text on which you would like to guide a workshop for a general audience interested in Catholic Studies (upload as Cover Letter); and 6.) a curriculum vitae. In addition, please provide the names and contact information for three references when prompted in the academic profile. This information will be utilized to solicit recommendation letters from your references within the employment system.
Application deadline is March 15, 2021.
The University of Kentucky is an Equal Opportunity Employer and encourages applications from veterans, individuals with disabilities, women, African Americans, and all minorities.
UCLA Medieval and Early Modern Graduate Student Conference
“Resilience, Resistance and Renewal in the Medieval and Early Modern World”
May 27, 2021 (over zoom)
The global medieval and early modern world (broadly considered, c. 900-1750) underwent myriad profound changes, from devastating famines, plagues, and wars to an increased entanglement of the continents, economic transformations, and technological and scientific developments. These changes were often accompanied by calls for the reshaping of the institutions and structures – political, religious, intellectual, etc. – which undergirded societies’ approach to these challenges, encompassing such responses as resistance, resilience, and renewal.
The Medieval and Early Modern Student Association (MEMSA) and Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (CMRS) at UCLA invite submissions of individual paper presentations (15-20 minutes) for an online conference considering aspects of cultural, environmental, social, economic, and other change in the global medieval and early modern world. We particularly encourage those whose work highlights moments of resilience, resistance, and renewal. Presenters from all disciplines are welcome, especially those that take on inter-disciplinary perspectives and methodologies. We hope to provide opportunities for graduate students to present their research on a variety of topics related to the global medieval and early modern world, including those that take into consideration issues that have been cast into greater relief as a result of our experiences in 2020.
Please contact the officers of MEMSA (memsa.ucla@gmail.com) to submit an abstract of the proposed presentation (250-300 words) by March 1, 2021.
Keynote Speaker: Professor Hussein Fancy, University of Michigan
IAS Medieval Studies and Near Eastern Studies Joint Lecture
February 19, 2021, 12:00-1:30 pm EST
The Turn to the Medieval in Ethiopian Studies – The Turn to Ethiopia in Medieval Studies I
Panelists:
Andrea Achi (Department of Medieval Art and The Cloisters at the Metropolitan Museum) ♦ Marie-Laure Derat (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) ♦ Kristen Windmuller-Luna (Cleveland Museum of Art) ♦ Felege-Selam Yirga (The University of Tennessee Knoxville)
We are eager to think together about the rich and often challenging complexities that have arisen as a result of the intersection of Medieval Studies and Ethiopian Studies over the past several years. These fields developed along very different lines, but have begun to mutually enrich – and interrogate – one another. In terms of regional networks, the two fields overlap in their concern with political, commercial, and cultural connections in the eastern Mediterranean: while Ethiopia represents for Medieval Studies an outgrowth of Mediterranean Studies, extending investigation for such exchanges down the Red Sea, Europe similarly represents for Ethiopian Studies a secondary ring of this zone of contact. Each offers the other a rich comparative (and sometimes connected) context for the study of Christian culture, including monasticism, hagiography, manuscript studies, and art and architecture, and both have investigated interconfessional relations in ways that might be mutually illuminating. Finally, together they contribute to an exploration of what ‘medieval Africa’ might entail, and allow us to explore the potentialities of more integrated, even global approaches to the premodern world. Yet the enrichment that this intersection of fields provides may also be problematic, as the distinctive chronologies, nomenclatures, and scholarly traditions of Medieval Studies and Ethiopian Studies meet. As research on premodern Ethiopia has greatly expanded in recent decades, and as Medieval Studies manifests increasing interest in Ethiopia, these paired webinars seek to explore what is gained and what is lost by more intensive conversation between them.
Register in advance for this meeting here.
The IAS Ethiopian Studies Series is convened by Suzanne Akbari (IAS), Aaron Butts (CUA/IAS), Samantha L. Kelly (Rutgers U/IAS), Sabine Schmidtke (IAS).
