The Medieval Academy Blog

Publication Prizewinners with President Maureen Miller

What a joy it was to gather in Washington, DC last week with more than 500 friends and colleagues! This year’s Annual Meeting was remarkable in so many ways: the number of attendees, the breadth of programming, the demographic and professional diversity of the presenters, and the noteworthy field trips to DC-area collections. The gathering included visits to Dumbarton Oaks and the Textile Museum, a textile workshop at The Avenir Center, the inaugural day-long Digital Medieval Studies Institute, and sessions at the National Gallery of Art (“Curating Global Medieval Art”) and the Library of Congress (“Fragmentology”). The closing reception was a jubilant gathering at the National Museum of Asian Art, with curators on hand to answer questions and guide us through the galleries.

The plenaries all engaged, in various ways, with issues of indigeneity and cross-cultural contact, beginning with Kiros A.B. Auld’s Land Acknowledgement that took us beyond platitudes and towards action (click here to learn more about the Indigenous Lands Project). The Land Acknowledgement can be found in the online program. President Maureen Miller’s plenary will be published in the July 2023 issue of Speculum.

Newly-inducted Fellows of the MAA with the Fellows Officers

I want to take this opportunity to thank Program Committee Chairs Jennifer Davis and Laura Morreale for their work organizing and implementing this very complex meeting, along with the Program Committee, the team of volunteers (led by Lilla Kopár, Sam Collins, and the MAA’s own Christopher Cole) and the many DC-area institutions and departments who supported this event. I would also like to thank Maureen Miller for her service as President and welcome incoming President Robin Fleming.

We look forward to seeing you at the University of Notre Dame in 2024 for the 99th Annual Meeting of the Medieval Academy of America!

– Lisa Fagin Davis, Executive Director

99th Annual Meeting of the Medieval Academy of America
University of Notre Dame
14-16 March 2024

The 99th Annual Meeting of the Medieval Academy of America will take place on the campus of the University of Notre Dame (South Bend, Indiana). The meeting is hosted by The Medieval Institute, St. Mary’s College, Holy Cross College, and Indiana University, South Bend.

The Program Committee invites proposals for papers on all topics and in all disciplines and periods of medieval studies. Any member of the Medieval Academy may submit a paper proposal; others may submit proposals as well but must become members in order to present papers at the meeting. Special consideration can be given to individuals whose specialty would not normally involve membership in the Medieval Academy.

Conference themes include Mapping the Middle Ages; Bodies in Motion; and Communities of Knowledge. In addition, we welcome innovative proposals that cross traditional disciplinary boundaries or that use various disciplinary approaches to examine an individual topic. We encourage papers on Asia, Africa, the Middle East, or Eastern Europe and the networks and exchanges between East and West.

See this page for more information and the full Call for Papers:

https://www.medievalacademy.org/page/2024AnnualMeeting

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.

The MAA/CARA Summer 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.

The Medieval Academy Book Subvention Program provides grants of up to $2,500 to university or other non-profit scholarly presses to support the publication of first books by Medieval Academy members. Click here for more information.

The Medieval Academy Inclusivity and Diversity Book Subvention Program provides subventions of up to $5000 to university or other non-profit scholarly presses to support the publication of books that contribute to diversity and inclusion in the field of Medieval Studies (broadly conceived) by Medieval Academy members. Click here for more information.

Applications for subventions will be accepted only from the publisher and only for books that have already been approved for publication. Eligible Academy members who wish to have their books considered for a subvention should ask their publishers to apply directly to the Academy, following the guidelines outlined on the relevant webpage. The deadline for proposals is 1 May 2023.

The next online meeting of the MAA’s Race and Gender Working Group will take place on March 24 from noon – 1:30pm EST. Roland Betancourt (Professor of Art History, University of California, Irvine) will speak on “The Case of Manuel I Komnenos: Articulating Identity through Gender, Sexuality, and Racialization.” Dr. Heather Badamo, University of California, Santa Barbara will be the respondent. Click here for more information and to register.

Join us on Wednesday, April 12, 3:00 to 4:30 pm for Medieval Crip Theory: New Approaches and Provocations, sponsored by the MAA’s Inclusivity and Diversity Committee.

This Webinar will explore and present new research on disability studies and the Middle Ages. The speakers are:

Richard H. Godden (Louisiana State University), “Cripping Langland’s Will”

Leah Parker (University of Southern Mississippi), “Eschatologies of Disability / Crip Eschatologies”

Tory V. Pearman (Miami University), “Cripping Time in Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale”

The webinar will be moderated by Heide Estes (Monmouth University) and Nahir Otaño-Gracia (University of New Mexico). The three papers will be followed by questions and discussion. Click here for more information and to register.

Speculations
The Centennial Issue of Speculum
January 2026

The centenary of a scholarly journal offers the opportunity to recognize, reflect on, and reimagine scholarly methods and objects, including canonicity and the discursive possibilities of scholarship; the boundaries, borders and spaces that define our disciplines; the genres and taxonomies that shape our work.

To mark the 100th anniversary of Speculum, we aim to commemorate the journal by raising questions about the methods and parameters of our study in a prospective rather than retrospective manner. What might the future of medieval studies look like? What might the place of this journal in that future be? The volume focuses on the future of the journal and the field it helps to define by inviting a wide breadth of scholarship that can collectively speculate about how we can take medieval studies into the future. But of course those living in the medieval world broadly considered speculated on their future as well. How was the future conceived in the past and what might those past reflections about the future, and about the condition of futurity generally, have to teach us as we consider recent shifts in our field and a shifting institutional context.

The format of the centennial volume will model the kind of contributions we seek: instead of 4-5 long form articles, we plan to publish 50 short essays (of approximately 3000 words each) in an attempt to represent a broader range of voices, perspectives, methodologies, and areas of study. We welcome traditional essays as well as innovative forms of research and reflection (pedagogical speculations, creative or dialogic writing, speculative history, etc.).

We invite contributions that speculate on the past and future of scholarly work in medieval studies. We particularly welcome essays that address gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and that use comparative and interdisciplinary methods and that address at least one of the following questions:

• What kinds of methods and theoretical models shape our work and will orient us in the future?
• How might we call on more inclusive and expansive understandings of the Middle Ages in light of the global turn and critical reappraisals of periodization.
• What histories do we examine, what histories do we obscure, and what criteria will most productively guide our examination of histories in the future?
• How have scholarly understandings of medieval historicity and temporality shaped the parameters of our inquiry, and how might we critically engage these accounts?

Proposals of 300 words should be sent to speculations@themedievalacademy.org by December 1, 2023.

Speculations editorial collective
Mohamad Ballan
Peggy McCracken
Cecily Hilsdale
Katherine Jansen
Sierra Lomuto
Cord J. Whitaker