2024 CARA Prizes

We are very pleased to announce the winners of the 2024 CARA Prizes:

The 2024 CARA Award for Excellence in Teaching has been awarded to Angela Mariani (Texas Tech Univ.).

The 2024 Robert L. Kindrick–CARA Award for Outstanding Service to Medieval Studies has been awarded to two scholars: Marjorie Harrington (Western Michigan Univ.) and Geraldine Heng (Univ. of Texas at Austin).

These prizes will be presented during the CARA Plenary Session at the upcoming Annual Meeting of the Medieval Academy on Friday, 15 March, at 10:30 AM. Please join us as we honor these medievalists for their teaching and service.

For more information about the MAA Committee for Centers and Regional Associations (CARA), please visit our website

Posted in Grants & Prizes | Leave a comment

Call for Applications – Rediscovering the Cultural Heritage of Upper Svaneti, Georgia

REDISCOVERING THE CULTURAL HERITAGE
OF UPPER SVANETI, GEORGIA
International Cultural Workshop

Date: 26 July – 4 August 2024

Destination: Mestia, Svaneti

Deadline for applications: 15 March 2024

Description

This project takes place in Upper Svaneti, the spectacular mountainous region of Western Georgia, which not only has an abundance and variety of cultural heritage, but also a unique way of life. Even today, the local population preserves various pre-Christian beliefs and rituals. In Upper Svaneti, medieval churches and residences with defense towers have been preserved in their original forms. Almost all these churches are decorated with paintings, and  original treasuries are kept in most of them: medieval painted and revetted icons, crosses, ecclesiastic vessels created in local workshops or many other regions of the Christian East and the West. Exposure to this extraordinary material will provide all students of medieval art with an entirely new perspective on their field.

The ten-day workshop will enable ten PhD and MA students to visit significant monuments of cultural heritage in Upper Svaneti, to take part in discussions on-site, and to engage in various field activities.

The workshop will be held in English.

The International Cultural Workshop is organized by the Institute of Art History and Theory at Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University, in cooperation with the College of Arts & Sciences at Syracuse University and the Art History Department at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. The project partner is the Svaneti Museum of History and-Ethnography.

The International Cultural Workshop (RCHUS) is funded under the US Embassy Georgia Cultural Small Grants Program.\

Application period
22 January to 15 March 2024 (00:00/Georgian Time Zone: UTC + 4)
The selection results will be announced on 8 April.

Eligibility
Applicants of any nationality must currently be enrolled in an MA or PhD program in Medieval or Byzantine art history or a related field.

Documents to be submitted:

Application form with other three documents:

– Curriculum vitae (with list of publications/presentations, maximum 3 pages)

– Cover letter outlining interest in the program (maximum 300 words)

– Recommendation letter

 

The application must be in English.

See here for Application form: https://forms.gle/GLAacswWY5VBHDrk7

Fees and Funding

The International Cultural Workshop (RCHUS) is free of charge: will cover travel from Tbilisi to Mestia, field trips, hotel accommodation and meals in Upper Svaneti.

The workshop participants must cover their own international flights to and from Georgia, and hotel accommodation in Tbilisi. However, there are limited funds for participating students in the project budget for partial covering the international transportation and accommodation in Tbilisi. Please clarify your need for funding on your Application form.

For further information, please contact: svaneti.workshop@gmail.com

Posted in Call for Papers | Leave a comment

Kao Book Webinar

Zoom Webinar 

January 25, 2024, 5:00–6:30 pm EST 

Please join us for the book launch of Wan-Chuan Kao’s White before Whiteness in the Late Middle Ages (Manchester University Press, 2024).

This book is supported by the Medieval Academy Inclusivity and Diversity Book Subvention award.

What difference does temporality make in the recognition politics of whiteness? If whiteness has hardened into a modern identity politics defined by skin tone, it has not always been so. 

Resisting a reflexive, biopolitical understanding of whiteness, White before Whiteness interrogates how whiteness as a representational trope produces and delimits a range of medieval ideological regimes: love, aesthetics, subjectivity, salvation, chivalry, labour, materiality and sociality. The book analyses works such as Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess, Pearl, The King of Tars and others, rethinking premodern whiteness as operations of fragility, precarity and racialicity across bodily and nonbodily figurations. 

Deploying diverse methodologies, this ground-breaking book offers a series of provocative diagnoses and original readings that reconceive whiteness as a systemic edge, generating operative differences that are never transparent, stable or permanent.

Speakers:

Nancy Coleman (Washington and Lee University)
Lisa H. Cooper (University of Wisconsin–Madison)
Sarah Friedman (University of Wisconsin–Madison)
Carissa Harris (Temple University)
Mike Hill (University at Albany, SUNY)
Elliot Kendall (University of Exeter)
Mariah Min (Brown University)
Susie Phillips (Northwestern University)

Register for Zoom webinar at whiteb4whiteness@gmail.com by January 24, 2024.

Participants will receive limited-time e-access to the Introduction and a discount code.

Sponsored by Washington and Lee University Library and The Medieval Studies Program, University of Wisconsin–Madison

Posted in Announcements | Leave a comment

GSC’s Digital Humanities Showcase

Join the Medieval Academy of America’s Graduate Student Committee for the second edition of Digital Humanities Showcase over Zoom on 30th January, 2024. This virtual gathering is a forum for scholars, both emerging and established, to gather and learn about, as well as celebrate, their achievements and work in the digital humanities, broadly conceived.

Click here to register.

Posted in Webinars | Leave a comment

2024 Medieval Academy of America Publication Prizes

We are very pleased to announce the winners of the 2024 Medieval Academy of America Publication Prizes:

The Haskins Medal
Leah DeVun, The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance (Columbia University Press, 2021)

The John Nicholas Brown Prize

Andrew Kraebel, Biblical Commentary and Translation in Later Medieval England: Experiments in Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020)

The Article Prize in Critical Race Studies

Mariah Junglan Min, “Preaching to the Choir Fantastic: Conversion and Racial Liminality in Elene, ” Exemplaria 34 (2022), 274-295

The Digital Humanities and Multimedia Studies Prize

Andrea Nanetti, Fra Mauro’s Map <https://engineeringhistoricalmemory.com/FraMauro.php>

The Van Courtlandt Elliott Prize

Jake A. Stattel, “Legal Culture in the Danelaw: A Study of III Aethelred,” Anglo-Saxon England 48 (2019 (appeared in 2022)), 163-203

The Karen Gould Prize in Art History

Alison Perchuk, The Medieval Monastery of Saint Elijah: A History in Paint and Stone (Brepols, 2021)

The Monica H. Green Prize

Amanda Luyster, Bringing the Holy Land Home <https://chertseytiles.holycross.edu/>

The Jerome E. Singerman Prize

Roland Betancourt, Byzantine Intersectionality: Sexuality, Gender & Race in the Middle Ages (Princeton University Press, 2020)
Jamie Kreiner, Legions of Pigs in the Early Medieval West (Yale University Press, 2020)

These prizes will be awarded at the upcoming Annual Meeting during the Presidential Plenary session on Saturday, 16 March, at 10:30 AM. Please join us as we honor these scholars and their important work.

Posted in Announcements, Grants & Prizes | Leave a comment

Rare Book School is now accepting applications for its summer 2024 courses.

To apply to courses and learn more about the application process, please visit https://rarebookschool.org/summer-2024-course…/.

For the best chance of being admitted, please submit your application(s) by the first-round deadline on 19 February. Applications received after that date will be reviewed on a rolling basis until all available seats have filled, but many of the classes will fill in the first round of admissions decisions.

This summer’s course schedule (https://rarebookschool.org/schedule/) features 42 classes, including online and in-person offerings at RBS’s new home in the University of Virginia’s recently renovated main library in Charlottesville. Other in-person courses will run at our partner institutions in Chicago; New Haven, Connecticut; New York City; Philadelphia; Princeton, New Jersey; and Upperville, Virginia.

We look forward to welcoming you to an RBS course this summer!

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

MAA News – From the Editor’s Desk

Happy New Year from the Editor’s Desk at Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies.  This year the journal brings many glad tidings. Let’s start with the January 99/1 (2024) issue, another multi-disciplinary collection of fascinating articles, beginning with “The Cerne Giant in Its Early Medieval Context,” co-authored by Thomas Morcom and Helen Gittos. The article takes its cue from the recent archeological redating of the Cerne Abbas Giant to the early Middle Ages to argue that the colossal figure cut into the Dorset hillside was meant to be understood as the classical hero Hercules and, in the early medieval period, was the marker of a muster station used by West Saxon armies. Moreover, by the eleventh century, legends emanating from a nearby monastery had transformed him into a local saint! Jamie C. Fumo’s “All That Glitters: Chaucer’s Pardoner, Safrounen, and Culinary Deception” unpacks the multifaceted meaning of the Pardoner’s invocation of saffron in his sermon by contextualizing the precious seasoning in its culinary history. We linger in late medieval England for “No Romance without Finance: Courtship in Late Medieval England,” by the team of Judith M. Bennett, Ruth Mazo Karras, and Janelle Werner. With a clear eye and decidedly without romance, the article analyzes how courtship for medieval men and women was not always just a step on the way to marriage; for poor women especially, it could represent an important financial transaction.  Crossing the channel, Eric Nemarich’s “Organistae and the Cultivation of Polyphony at Notre-Dame de Paris, c. 1190–1273” revises the history of polyphonic masters on the Left Bank of Paris by scouring the archives to show how, in the first decades of the thirteenth century, they were supported by the bishops of Paris. It was only in the later years of the century, when episcopal patronage eroded, that the masters developed a reputation as “impoverished choral clerks.”  And finally, in “The Time of Custom and the Medieval Myth of Ancient Customary Law,” Ada Maria Kuskowski takes a hard look at the idea that in the Middle Ages customary law was necessarily “good old law.” She finds instead that it was only in the modern—not the medieval—period that customary law began to be reframed as old law.

By the time you read this newsletter, the digital and PDF versions of the January issue will have been published online on the University of Chicago Press website, while the printed version may have already reached your mailbox. In addition, our Speculum Spotlight podcast, a collaboration with “The Multicultural Middle Ages,” will also have posted. Will Beattie hosts this episode that features an animated conversation with Thomas Morcom and Helen Gittos, who discuss their article (encapsulated above), “The Cerne Giant in its Early Medieval Context.” The podcast is available here. We are also proud to note that their research findings published in this Speculum article have been picked up with breathtaking speed in US and UK news outlets, including the Smithsonian Magazine; Newsweek; the BBC; the Guardian; the Times; the Daily Mail; and various BBC radio programs, including Radio 4’s Today, demonstrating vividly that the scholarly research of medievalists, and by extension humanists in general, continues to be recognized as of interest to wide audiences, and of course, as we all know, as a valuable tool for understanding our world.

Looking back, in my last column I reported on a list of prizes recently awarded to Speculum articles. Happily, we have one more to add to that list: the 2023 Bishko Memorial Prize from the Association for Spanish & Portuguese Historical Studies has been awarded to Adam Franklin-Lyons and Marie A. Kelleher for their article “Framing Mediterranean Famine: Food Crisis in Fourteenth-Century Barcelona,” Speculum 97/1 (2022): 40–76. The citation’s concluding sentence commends it as an “exceptionally brilliant and deeply deserving work of path-breaking scholarship.” Congratulations to Adam and Marie!

Looking forward, our next issue, April 99/2 (2024), a themed issue, is the much anticipated “Race, Race-Thinking, and Identity in the Global Middle Ages,” guest-edited by the team of Cord J. Whitaker, Nahir Otaño Gracia, and F. X. Fauvelle. It is a lively issue, peopled overwhelmingly by early career scholars, who have brought the questions, methods, and preoccupations of premodern critical race studies to bear on medieval topics. Look for the postcard and posters promoting the issue at meetings of the AHA, the MLA, the CAA, RaceB4Race, and of course the March meeting of the Medieval Academy of America at the University of Notre Dame.

Finally, speaking of themed issues, we are thrilled to report that the call for proposals for Speculations, the journal’s centenary issue, to be published in 2026, received a spectacular response from the international community of medievalists. By the time the deadline closed on 1 December, we had received over 225 proposals for only 50 places in the issue. We’ll get to work selecting proposals later this month. But as one of our editorial collective remarked, “this is going to be hard!” Such a stunning response demonstrates that in 2024 medieval studies is alive and well and overflowing with new ideas for the future of our discipline.

Happy New Year once again! I look forward to seeing you in South Bend.

Katherine L. Jansen
Editor, Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies

Posted in MAA Newsletter | Leave a comment

MAA News – 2024 Governance Election

I am very pleased to report the results of the recent governance election:

President: Sara Lipton (History, Stony Brook Univ.) [Congratulations!]
1st Vice-President: Peggy McCracken (French and Comparative Literature, Univ. of Michigan) [Congratulations!]
2nd Vice-President: Haruko Momma (English, New York Univ.)

Council:
Alka Patel (Art History, Univ. of California, Irvine)
Michael Ryan (History, Univ. of New Mexico)
Krista Sue-Lo Twu (English, Univ. of Minnesota Duluth)
Elizabeth Dospel Williams (Curator, Byzantine Collection, Dumbarton Oaks)

Nominating Committee:
Chair (appointed by MAA President): Fiona Griffiths (Stanford Univ.,
Elected members:
Nicholas Paul (History, Fordham Univ.)
Kristina Richardson (History, Univ. of Virginia)

My thanks to all who stood for election and to all who voted. I very much look forward to working with these new Councilors and Nominating Committee members when they take office in March.

– Lisa

Posted in MAA Newsletter | Leave a comment

MAA News – 2024 Annual Meeting: Registration is Open!

The 99th annual meeting of the Medieval Academy of America takes place this year on March 14–16, 2024, at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana. The Medieval Institute will be serving as your host and now welcome you to join us. Registration for the conference is now available here, where you will also find direct links to the conference program, local hotels offering discounted rates, and a general overview of conference activities. The discounted hotel rates for attendees remain in effect only through February 13, 2024, and online registration closes February 16, 2024, so we urge you to register soon. The conference will be entirely in person, though the plenary lectures and some other events will also be live-streamed. We look forward to seeing you in South Bend!

Posted in MAA Newsletter | Leave a comment

MAA News – Call for Summer Mentoring Program Applications

The Medieval Academy of America’s Mentoring Program Committee is excited to announce the 2024 Summer Research and Professional Development Workshop for PhD-track students. This program is designed to foster the growth of essential skills and mentorship relationships, and improve the educational experiences for graduate students in fields intersecting with Medieval Studies. Our primary goals are to facilitate the development of successful dissertation projects, foster networking and community-building, and improve competitiveness for grants and academic positions.

In Zoom sessions over the summer, and then at the in-person event, workshop leaders will help student participants learn about the range of available grants, develop successful strategies for securing these funding opportunities, and begin to work with them to produce their own grant proposals (with specific attention on identifying the broader contributions of their research, developing budgets, and proposing viable schedules). The in-person event for US, Canadian, and Mexican participants will take place at the University of California at Berkeley on August 1-4 (participants from other regions will join via Zoom).

We are accepting applications for twelve student participants and two workshop leaders, all of whom will receive stipends and, for those attending the culminating event in person, travel and lodging funds. Click here for more information and to apply.

Applications are due on 22 January for participants and 2 February for workshop leaders.

Posted in MAA Newsletter | Leave a comment