The Medieval Academy Blog

The MAA/CARA Summer Tuition Scholarships support graduate students and especially promising undergraduate students participating in summer courses in medieval languages or manuscript studies.* Applicants must be members of the Medieval Academy in good standing with at least one year of graduate school remaining and must demonstrate both the importance of the summer course to their program of study and their home institution’s inability to offer analogous coursework. Click here for more information.

*Please note that the MAA will soon open application portals for three Summer Skills Workshops to be run under its own auspices (in Old French, Latin Paleography, and Medieval Latin). These workshops are heavily subsidized and will therefore not be eligible for MAA/CARA Tuition Scholarships.

Gregory Carrier

I would like to thank the Medieval Academy of America for this award of the Inclusivity and Diversity Research Grant in support of my doctoral dissertation on the life and thought of Herman of Reichenau, a severely disabled scholar from the eleventh century. Scholars have thoroughly examined Herman’s significant contributions to eleventh-century intellectual thought; Herman’s disability and what he and his contemporaries thought of it has not received the same level of attention. The grant will support a summer visit to Reichenau Abbey, particularly the additional expenses I incur as a deaf-blind scholar. At the abbey where Herman spent his adult life, I plan to examine how disability was viewed on the island in the eleventh century. I plan to pay particular attention to the Church of St Georg, a tenth-century church near the abbey containing a fresco cycle depicting Christ’s various healings of disabled people in the Gospels. Herman and the other abbey residents would have been familiar with this church and its frescoes, which hints at a broader religious and social context of ideas about disability in southern Germany during the tenth and eleventh centuries, and thus contribute to the growing diversity of research undertaken in medieval studies.

It’s not too late to book a guest lecture through the Medieval Academy Centennial Speaker Series! Twenty-one MAA Fellows are available to give subsidized and/or free talks and lectures at venues around North America, either in-person or on Zoom. These Fellows have proposed a variety of potential talks for both general and specialized audiences. It is an exciting list, and a fitting way to celebrate the Centennial of the MAA, as well as a means of supporting the Humanities in these challenging times. This series is aimed primarily at venues where scholarly talks from medievalists are not an everyday occurrence.

The University of Missouri – Kansas City recently took advantage of this opportunity by welcoming Patrick Geary to campus as part of a two-day symposium. Organizer Virginia Blanton sent this report:

“I am writing to report on the absolutely fantastic visit this week of Patrick Geary to UMKC. It was such a wonderful two days of great conversation about medieval history, grant-writing, ideal software, team-building, and more. Patrick’s lecture was a huge success, with faculty and students from across the campus. I was so excited that two UMKC geneticists from Biology and two bone researchers from our dental school were present and had interesting questions. Patrick was incredibly generous with his time and ideas, meeting with students and with our Digital and Public Humanities faculty. Out of all of this, I was able to meet one of my great heroes whose work on the cult of the saints shaped my own and offer him the chance to see that we are doing some interesting DH and manuscript research in our small corner of the world. So thank you to MAA, CARA, and the Fellows for making this program possible. I am really very grateful.”

Click the link below for more information and to learn how your institution can take advantage of this unique opportunity as well!

https://www.medievalacademy.org/general/custom.asp?page=CentennialSpeakerSeries

2026 Medieval Academy of America Annual Meeting:
Consortiums and Confluences
Call for Papers

The 101st annual Meeting of the Medieval Academy of America will take place on March 19–21, 2026 on the campuses of the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Amherst College, and will also include events at Mt. Holyoke College and Smith College. Hosted by the Five College Consortium, the theme of the meeting is “Consortiums and Confluences.” The program will bring together scholars from a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds addressing the medieval world and critical topics in Medieval Studies. Our plenary lectures will be given by Elly Truitt (Associate Professor of History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania), Peggy McCracken (Incoming President of the Medieval Academy of America and Professor of French, Women’s Studies, and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan), and Jesús Rodríguez-Velasco (Augustus R. Street Professor of Spanish & Portuguese and Comparative Literature at Yale University). We are excited to welcome you to Amherst, MA, and its environs, and look forward to meeting you, learning from you, and celebrating our shared commitment to Medieval Studies.

Click here for more information and the full Call for Papers.

Every month, we’ll be spotlighting two MAA Centennial Grant Projects. These twenty-one projects span the continent and reflect some of the best that Medieval Studies has to offer. We are so pleased to be able to support these symposia, performances, and digital initiatives as part of our Centennial celebrations.

Ohio: Mothers and Sisters of the Veil. With concerts on 21 and 22 March by Trobár Medieval (Cleveland), “Mothers and Sisters of the Veil” explores the lives of medieval nuns through their spiritual familial experience, with repertoire drawing from both Western Catholic and Byzantine Orthodox traditions of chant. Click here for

Puerto Rico: Jornadas caribeñas de estudios medievales: dedicadas a la Dra. Isabel Gutierrez del Arroyo (Caribbean Conferences on Medieval Studies: In Memory of Dr. Isabel Guitierrez del Arroyo), University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras Campus. From 31 March – 2 April, this conference will be dedicated to promoting and highlighting the importance and relevance of Medieval Studies on the island, in memory of Dr. Gutierrez del Arroyo – to celebrate her life, interest, and audacity as a scholar. This three-day event will focus on the importance of Medieval Studies in Latin America and the Caribbean and will present research of local medievalists.

We are very pleased to announce the winners of the 2025 Medieval Academy of America Publication Prizes. Please join us at the upcoming Annual Meeting as we honor these scholars and their work. The prizes will be presented during the Presidential Plenary Session on Saturday 22 March at 10:30 AM.

The Haskins Medal
Rita Copeland
Emotion and the History of Rhetoric in the Middle Ages
(Oxford Univ. Press, 2022)

The John Nicholas Brown Prize
Janna Coomans
Community, Urban Health and Environment in the Late Medieval Low Countries 
(Cambridge Univ. Press, 2021)

The Article Prize in Critical Race Studies
Mohamad Ballan
“Borderland Anxieties: Lisān al-Dīn ibn al-Khat ̣ īb (d. 1374) and the Politics of Genealogy in Late Medieval Granada,”
Speculum 98, no. 2 (2023): 447-495

The Digital Humanities and Multimedia Studies Prize
Wendy Belcher
Princeton Ethiopian, Eritrean, and Egyptian Miracles of Mary Project
https://pemm.princeton.edu/en-us

The Van Courtlandt Elliott Prize
Grace Delmolino
“Fraudulent Counsel: Legal Temporality and the Poetics of Liability in Dante’s Inferno, Boniface VIII’s Liber Sextus, and Gratian’s De penitentia,”
Speculum 98, no. 3 (2023): 727-762

The Karen Gould Prize in Art History
Jennifer Regan Borland
Visualizing Household Health: Medieval Women, Art, and Knowledge in the Régime du corps
(The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2022)

The Monica H. Green Prize
Kristopher Kersey
Facing Images: Medieval Japanese Art and the Problem of Modernity
(The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2024)

The Jerome E. Singerman Prize
Adrienne Williams Boyarin
The Christian Jew and the Unmarked Jewess: the Polemics of Sameness in Medieval English Anti-Judaism
(University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021)

Online Registration for the Annual Meeting closes on March 6!

Early-bird discounted registration has ended, but you can still take advantage of online registration until March 6. In-person registration will be available with an additional surcharge.

Registration is open for the Centennial Meeting of the Medieval Academy of America, which will take place on the campus of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts on 20-22 March 2025. This year’s Centennial program, hosted by Harvard University in collaboration with Boston College, Boston University, Brandeis University, Fitchburg State University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stonehill College, Tufts University, and Wellesley College, will bring together nearly 500 scholars from three continents, 23 countries, over 200 academic institutions, and a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds for 114 paper sessions, four plenary lectures, and a host of associated workshops and events, addressing the medieval world from the North Atlantic to the Sea of Japan as well as the histories and possible futures of Medieval Studies itself. While this will be an in-person meeting, our plenary lectures—given by Kristina Richardson (Professor of History and Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Virginia), Sara Lipton (President of the Medieval Academy of America and Professor of History at Stony Brook University), Wendy Belcher (Professor of Comparative Literature and African American Studies at Princeton University), and a diverse group of medieval scholars and administrators—will be live streamed.

We are excited to welcome you to Cambridge, and look forward to meeting you, learning from you, and celebrating our shared commitment to Medieval Studies. As of February 17, the general registration fee is $150 for members ($175 for non-members), with the registration fee for members who are graduate students, contingent faculty, or independent scholars set at $100 ($125 for non-membera).

Click here for more information and to register!