Jobs For Medievalists

Assistant Professor – Medieval Latin Studies and Culture 1100-1300

Date Posted: 09/01/2023
Closing Date: 10/06/2023, 11:59PM ET
Req ID: 33377
Job Category: Faculty – Tenure Stream (continuing)
Faculty/Division: Faculty of Arts & Science
Department: Centre for Medieval Studies
Campus: St. George (Downtown Toronto)

Description

The Centre for Medieval Studies (CMS) in the Faculty of Arts and Science at the University of Toronto invites applications for a full-time tenure-stream position in Medieval Latin Studies and Culture from 1100 to 1300. The appointment will be at the rank of Assistant Professor, with an expected start date of July 1, 2024.

Candidates must have earned a PhD degree in Medieval Studies or a related area by the time of appointment, or shortly thereafter, with a demonstrated record of excellence in research and teaching. We seek candidates whose research and teaching interests complement and enhance our existing departmental strengths.

The position comes with teaching and service allocated to the Undergraduate Program in Mediaeval Studies at Saint Michael’s College (SMC).

The Centre for Medieval Studies is the leading research center in North America dedicated to the interdisciplinary study of the languages and cultures that flourished during the Middle Ages. The Centre consists of a student body of approximately 60 students, enrolled in the Master of Arts, the Doctor of Philosophy and several Collaborative Specializations, and an equal number of distinguished faculty, most of whom are cross-appointed with various departments. The Centre for Medieval Studies offers opportunities for both graduate-level teaching and, thanks to its close collaboration with the program in Mediaeval Studies at Saint Michael’s College, for undergraduate-level teaching and supervision.  As one of the leading scholars in the field, the successful candidate will participate actively within both of these programs and help to promote their collaboration and a consistency across the University of Toronto’s medieval studies curriculum on a global scale. The successful candidate will also have the opportunity to participate in and enhance established research-driven initiatives, such as the publication series Toronto Medieval Latin Texts, the Toronto Medieval Texts and Translations, the Journal of Medieval Studies, the SMC One Boyle Seminar in Scripts and Stories, or The Other Sister research group.

In terms of graduate teaching, the successful candidate will be expected to contribute substantially to the Medieval Latin program, which is the program of reference in the field in North America and comprises four levels of instruction (Medieval Latin I and II, advanced seminars, and N/CR summer courses for beginners), as well as to the area of Manuscript Studies and Textual Cultures (Paleography, Codicology, Diplomatics, and topic-focused courses). In terms of undergraduate teaching, the successful candidate will be expected to develop and contribute foundational and upper-level courses in the undergraduate program in Mediaeval Studies at Saint Michael’s College, as well as to supervise senior essays and research-focussed student initiatives. In terms of research, the successful candidate will be expected to pursue innovative and independent research at the highest international level and to establish an outstanding, competitive, and externally funded research program in the areas of Medieval Latin Studies and Manuscript Studies and Textual Cultures. The successful candidate will also be expected to contribute to the highly interdisciplinary environment of CMS and SMC, especially in the field of social and intellectual history (e.g., history of education, medicine, preaching, or Mediterranean/global studies).

Candidates must provide evidence of research excellence which can be demonstrated by a record of publications in top-ranked and field-relevant journals or forthcoming publications meeting high international standards, the submitted research statement, presentations at significant conferences, awards and accolades, and strong endorsements from referees of high standing.

Evidence of excellence in teaching will be provided through teaching accomplishments, the teaching dossier (with required materials outlined below) submitted as part of the application, as well as strong letters of reference. 

Salary will be commensurate with qualifications and experience. 

All qualified candidates are invited to apply online by clicking the link below. Applicants must submit a cover letter; a current curriculum vitae; a research statement outlining current and future research interests; a recent writing sample; and a teaching dossier to include a strong teaching statement, sample course materials, and teaching evaluations. 

Applicants must provide the name and contact information of three references. The University of Toronto’s recruiting tool will automatically solicit and collect letters of reference from each after an application is submitted (this happens overnight). Applicants remain responsible for ensuring that references submit letters (on letterhead, dated and signed) by the closing date. More details on the automation reference letter collection, including timelines, are available in the candidate FAQ.

Submission guidelines can be found at http://uoft.me/how-to-apply. Your CV and cover letter should be uploaded into the dedicated fields. Please combine additional application materials into one or two files in PDF/MS Word format. If you have any questions about this position, please contact Prof. Elisa Brilli (Centre for Medieval Studies, Director) at director.medieval@utoronto.ca.

All application materials, including reference letters, must be received by October 6, 2023.

All qualified candidates are encouraged to apply; however, Canadians and permanent residents will be given priority.

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MAA News – Our Centennial is Coming!

Dear Colleagues,

I hope you all had a productive and relaxing summer!

You likely know by now that the Medieval Academy of America will celebrate its centennial in 2025. We have been thinking about this important milestone for several years, and we have several initiatives in the works:

1) Annual Meeting: Our 100th Annual Meeting will take place in Cambridge, Massachusetts on the campus of Harvard University, co-hosted by a consortium of Boston-area institutions. Mark your calendars for 20-23 March 2025, and join us for this very special Annual Meeting! The call for papers will be posted in early 2024, and more information about special events, exhibits, and funding opportunities associated with the meeting will be available soon.

2) Publications: Special issues of Speculum will commemorate the MAA’s Centennial (2025) and the journal’s 100th volume (2026).

3) Public Programming: Thanks to the leadership of former MAA President Thomas E. Dale and the Centennial Implementation Committee, we are very pleased to announce funding for Centennial Grants of up to $5,000 each supporting the planning and implementation of local events and projects celebrating and promoting medieval studies in education and the arts. Click here for more information and to apply!

Our Centennial presents us with important opportunities to critically engage with our past, consider our present, and imagine our future. We hope you will join us!

– Lisa

Lisa Fagin Davis

Executive Director

Medieval Academy of America

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MAA News – Call for Publication Prize Submissions

The Medieval Academy of America invites submissions for the following prizes to be awarded at the 2024 MAA Annual Meeting. The Medieval Academy warmly encourages the nomination of publications written by scholars working beyond the tenure track as well as those written by faculty. Unless otherwise indicated, submissions are to be made by the publisher. If your project, monograph, or article is eligible, please contact your publisher and ask them to nominate your work. Submission instructions vary, but all dossiers must complete by 15 October 2023.

PLEASE NOTE: because of the ongoing MAA office closure, PDF review copies of nominated books may be submitted instead of hardcopies (PDFs should be emailed to the Executive Director). In addition, the residency restrictions limiting eligibility for some book prizes to residents of North America have been lifted.

John Nicholas Brown Prize
Awarded to a first monograph of outstanding quality in the field of medieval studies.

Article Prize in Critical Race Studies
Awarded annually to an article in the field of medieval studies that explores questions of race and the medieval world, and which is judged by the selection committee to be of outstanding quality.

Digital Humanities Prize
Awarded to an outstanding digital research project or resource in the field of medieval studies.

Van Courtlandt Elliott Prize
Awarded to a first article of outstanding quality in the field of medieval studies.

Karen Gould Prize
Awarded to a monograph of outstanding quality in medieval art history.

Monica H. Green Prize
Awarded to an exceptional project that demonstrates the value of medieval studies in our present day.

Haskins Medal
Awarded to a distinguished monograph in the field of medieval studies.

Jerome Singerman Prize
Awarded to a meritorious second monograph in the field of medieval studies.

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MAA News – Fellows Research Awards

We are very pleased to announce the inaugural Fellows Research Awards. Supported entirely by donations from the Fellows of the Medieval Academy of America, the Fellows Fund will support two annual awards for members of the Medieval Academy who do not have access to research funding. Two awards of $5,000 will be granted annually to Ph.D. candidates and/or non-tenure-track scholars to support research in medieval studies. The awards will help fund travel and/or access expenses to consult original sources, archives, manuscripts, works of art, or monuments in situ. Applicants must be members of the Medieval Academy of America by Sept. 15 of the year in which they apply.

To apply for a Fellows Research Award, submit the application form and attachment by October 1, 2023. Awards will be announced at the 2024 Medieval Academy annual meeting. Click here for more information and to apply.

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MAA News – Upcoming Deadlines

The Medieval Academy of America invites applications for the following grants. Please note that applicants must be members in good standing as of September 15 in order to be eligible for Medieval Academy awards.

Schallek Fellowship
The Schallek Fellowship provides a one-year grant of $30,000 to support Ph.D. dissertation research in any relevant discipline dealing with late-medieval Britain (ca. 1350-1500). (Deadline 15 October 2023)

Travel Grants
The Medieval Academy provides travel grants to help Academy members who hold doctorates but are not in full-time faculty positions, or are contingent faculty without access to institutional funding, attend conferences to present their work. (Deadline 1 November 2023 for meetings to be held between 16 February and 31 August 2024)

MAA/CARA Conference Grant
The MAA/CARA Conference Grant for Regional Associations and Programs awards $1,000 to help support a regional or consortial conference taking place in 2024. (Deadline 15 October 2023)

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MAA News – Good News From Our Members

Nancy L. Wicker (Univ. of Mississippi) has been awarded a Solmsen Fellowship to carry out research on Viking-Age art at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin for the academic year 2023–2024.

Several MAA members have recently been awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities:

Jennifer Feltman (Univ. of Alabama), “Notre Dame in Color: Interpreting the Layers of Polychromy on the Sculptures of the Cathedral of Paris Using 3D Modeling”

Carrie Beneš (New College of Florida), Laura Ingallinella (University of Toronto), Amanda Madden (Rosenzweig Center, GMU), Laura Morreale, “La sfera (The Globe): A Late Medieval World of Merchants, Maps, and Manuscripts”

Congratulations! If you have good news to share, please send it to Executive Director Lisa Fagin Davis.

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MAA News – New NHC Course Supported by MAA

In the wake of the extremely successful 2021 collaboration between the National Humanities Center and the Medieval Academy of America to design and launch an online curriculum-development course on “Medieval Africa and Africans“, we are very pleased to announce the launch of a follow-up NHC course, “Islam in the Middle Ages.

On August 28, the NHC announced that the fall 2023 sessions of both courses would be offered free of charge in order to enable the participation of as many educators as possible. Registration opened at noon that day, and both courses were full in less three hours. Both will run again in the spring, however, so if you were unable to register for the fall session, you will have another opportunity in a few months.

This collaboration, and these courses, are a critical component of the Medieval Academy’s goal of broadening how we all think, research, write, and teach about the period. At a moment when the humanities, DEI initiatives, and Critical Theories of all types are under threat in many parts of the United States, this grass-roots work is even more important. The “Medieval Africa and Africans” course has run fifteen six-week sessions since January 2021, training nearly 400 K-16 educators. Across all levels, the course has helped these educators bring medieval Africa into their curricula. We hope that the new course on “Islam in the Middle Ages” will have a similar impact.

– Lisa

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Call for Papers – New Work on Old Dance: A Pre-1800 Dance Studies Symposium

What does it look like for historical expressions of dancing and movement arts to break out of traditional academic and performative boxes? How do scholars and practitioners escape the boundaries of discipline, chronology, geography, and methodology subsumed under the conventional appellation of “early dance”? Conversely, how can we demonstrate the ways in which our work complements and completes the work of other disciplines in light of these distinctions? This symposium explores early dance as an idea, a time, a place, a locus of cultural meaning and aims to draw together scholars working across disciplines and geographies who are nevertheless invested in “early” dance and movement.

We invite papers for this virtual symposium from scholars across disciplines, exploring aspects of dance and movement from all methodological perspectives, finding commonality in the antecedental nature of their work. Whether looking at the musical, literary, cultural, political, religious, or social contexts of dance, or expanding knowledge of its somatic and kinesthetic dimensions, we find unity in the chronological earliness of our work. We encourage papers that explore dance outside of Western European frameworks of knowledge and movement production, including comparative or transhistorical perspectives on pre-1800 or “early” dance.

Submission due date: Sept. 15, 2023
Notification of acceptance by Nov. 1, 2023
Submit proposals via submission portal:
https://web.sas.upenn.edu/earlydance/submit

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Upcoming NHC Webinars

Registration is now open for the National Humanities Center 2023–24 Humanities in Class Webinar Series. Each webinar is a live, interactive professional conversation led by a scholarly expert addressing a compelling topic through the lens of the humanities. Appropriate for educators at all levels, from K-12 to collegiate classrooms, each session features research, source documents, and readings to support the discussion. Webinars are free of charge but require registration: https://goto.webcasts.com/starthere.jsp?ei=1621294&tp_key=61040986e0.

Two of the upcoming webinars have a medieval focus:

“Teaching Chaucer”

Timothy L. Stinson (NHC Fellow, 2021–22; Associate Professor of English, North Carolina State University)
January 11, 2024
The reasons why someone would want to study Chaucer are widely known. He is, after all, celebrated as the “father of English literature,” famous for putting English literary culture on an equal footing with its continental European competitors. His poetry contains multitudes; it is at turns spiritual and earthy, learned and colloquial, earnest and lighthearted. Generations of students have come to love Chaucer’s sly humor, refreshing lack of orthodoxy, and novel framing of humanity’s perennial questions and quandaries. But his poetry presents significant challenges for the beginning reader, as well as the instructor tasked with teaching it for the first time. His fourteenth-century English differs considerably from our own. He assumes a deep knowledge of classical and biblical traditions. And he relies upon knowledge of medieval genres and social constructions that only those with special training will know. This webinar aims to equip instructors with tools and assignments to build bridges between what is unfamiliar in Chaucer and our students’ areas of expertise (e.g., modern television and film genres). By the end of the seminar, participants will have both a deeper knowledge of Chaucer and his poetry and concrete examples of exercises and approaches for teaching his poetry.

“Myth-Busting Medieval Disability”

Kisha G. Tracy (Professor, English Studies, Fitchburg State University)
January 30, 2024
The topic of disability heritage rarely receives the attention that it deserves, despite the fact that people with disabilities are integral to every society and every time period. The discomfort many feel at engaging with disability—and, further, with disability studies—stems from long-standing stigma and from a fear of understanding that any person at any time may experience disability, either themselves or through someone close to them. Emphasizing disability heritage helps to alleviate this stigma and fear, affecting how people with disabilities are treated and understood today. Popular myths about disability in the Middle Ages in particular tend to be rather grim, assuming that people with disabilities were always treated with disdain if not outright violence. While these experiences certainly existed, the reality of medieval disability is far more complex and dynamic. This webinar will help educators navigate preconceptions about medieval disability and illuminate the heritage of disability. By the end, educators will be able to teach about disability heritage using examples of individuals with disabilities, their experiences, and how they were treated in the past; how the field of disability studies applies to the Middle Ages; and how historical disability helps us understand and discuss modern disability.

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Call for Papers – Creating Camelot(s): The Idea of Community in Arthurian Texts (virtual)

Sponsored by Alliance for the Promotion of Research on the Matter of Britain and International Arthurian Society, North American Branch (IAS/NAB)

Organizers: Michael A. Torregrossa and Joseph M. Sullivan

Call for Papers – Please Submit Proposals by 15 September 2023
59th International Congress on Medieval Studies
Western Michigan University (Kalamazoo, Michigan)
Hybrid event: Thursday, 9 May, through Saturday, 11 May, 2024

Session Objective

Creating Camelot(s): The Idea of Community in Arthurian Texts (virtual)

Although we often refer to the Matter of Britain as the Arthurian tradition, the figure of King Arthur is merely the center point of the story. The tales are in fact about the community that Arthur builds and the ways those inside it (and outside as well) interact with each other. Through Arthur and those he surrounds himself with, Camelot becomes a living thing, and we experience its birth, maturity, and death, as well as its re-creation across the ages.

In this session, we’d like to highlight the multiple ways that Arthur’s realm has been constructed from the Middle Ages to the present. Submissions can explore the Arthurian legends from across time and/or space as represented through diverse genres and media.

We seek contributions from a range of scholars–those within the disciplines of Arthurian Studies and/or Medieval Studies as well as those in outside fields, including beyond the humanities–as they consider at least one of the following questions:

  • What are the origins of Camelot? How do Arthur’s literary and/or historic predecessors (Ambrosius Aurelius, Arthur of Dal Riada, Constantine, Fionn mac Cumhaill, Lucius Artorius Castus, Riothamus, Uther Pendragon, Vortigern, ) influence the creation of his home base? What real locales inspired the idea or site of Camelot?
  • Moving forwards, how has Camelot been built as a physical place whether in the Arthurian past or in post-Arthurian re-creations? What does the site look like? How does it function as a space where individuals live and work?
  • Also, how has Camelot been shaped as a communal space, a location for people to come together in fellowship, and who has been included within this group? In what ways does the community grow and change under Arthur and/or his successors?
  • Alternatively, who has been excluded and/or expelled from the space(s) of Camelot, and in what ways have those individuals dealt with this loss?
  • Similarly, who has been invited to join the community at Camelot but resisted its entreaties and/or rebelled against Arthur and his rule (or that of his successors)? What are the reasons for their rejection of Camelot? How do their actions impact the Arthurian world?
  • Lastly, do those removed from and/or repelled by Camelot ever integrate (or re-integrate) and become part of the community? How does this acceptance shape them and/or the world of Camelot?

Submission Information

All proposals must be submitted into the Confex system at https://wmich.edu/medievalcongress/call by 15 September 2023. You will be prompted to complete sections on Title and Presentation Information, People, Abstract, and Short Description.

Be advised of the following policies of the Congress: “You are invited to make one paper proposal to one session of papers. This may be to one of the Sponsored or Special Sessions of Papers, which are organized by colleagues around the world, OR to the General Sessions of Papers, which are organized by the Program Committee in Kalamazoo. You may propose an unlimited number of roundtable contributions. However, you will not be scheduled as an active participant (as a paper presenter, roundtable discussant, presider, respondent, workshop leader, or performer) in more than three sessions.”.

Thank you for your interest in our session. Please address questions and/or concerns to the organizers at KingArthurForever2000@gmail.com.

For more information on the  Alliance for the Promotion of Research on the Matter of Britain, please visit our website at https://KingArthurForever.blogspot.com/.

For more information on the International Arthurian Society, North American Branch (IAS/NAB), please visit our website at https://www.international-arthurian-society-nab.org/ and consider becoming a member of our organization.

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