The first
issue of Medieval Academy News was published in September
of 1948. It consisted of one side of one sheet of letter-size
paper and looked remarkably similar to any issue published in
the following century . . . until now. The spring 2009 issue
of the News was the last in that line (though published
on the Web, it was formatted in the same way and produced using
the same software program as its predecessors). Beginning with
the fall 2009 issue, the newsletter will be more interactive
and easier to use than its paper ancestors.
The twentieth
century newsletters were geared to providing information (including,
for many years, a conscientiously kept listing of deaths of
Academy members). In the twenty-first century, the scope broadened
to include short articles on a variety of subjects, often lighter
ones, that were thought to be of interest to Academy members.
Some were solicited, others were simply offered. They were then
extracted from the newsletter and published in our newsletter
archives.
The Spring
2009 newsletter that was posted on the Academy website was really
an act of remediation. With this issue for Fall 2009, we present
a publication that takes advantage of many facets of the electronic
medium unavailable in a paper format. As in the past, the newsletter
in its new medium and format will contain news about the Academy,
past, present, and future, information about opportunities of
various sorts available to our members, such as grants, prizes,
fellowships, summer schools, job opportunities, and publishing
opportunities, as well as "news and notes" of whatever crosses
the editor's desk.
One significant
advantage of the medium is the loosening of word limits. A feature
article need no longer be squeezed into 1,450 words to fit on
a page, and the inclusion of color images will also be possible.
Medieval Academy News will now be an integral part of the Medieval
Academy website; links will take you in and out of the newsletter.
One function of this is that texts may appear in more than one
place, so that, wherever you begin (i.e., wherever you enter
the site), whether at the opening page (http://www.MedievalAcademy.org),
at the "front page" of the News (http://www.MedievalAcademy.org/news),
or at some other spot, you will find the information you are
searching for easily and quickly. Suggestions for improvement
in this area are very welcome; please send them to the editor
of the newsletter (MA@MedievalAcademy.org).
9/24/2009
Newsflash:
For those
who have not heard, the largest-ever Anglo-Saxon
gold hoard has just been discovered in Staffordshire.
President's
Column
"Even
before I became an officer of the Academy, I was impressed by
the remarkable vitality of scholarship on the Middle Ages as
manifested year after year by the papers and book displays at
its annual meetings, and those at Kalamazoo and Leeds as well.
Now, I am learning firsthand how the Academy is considering
new ways to tap that energy." [Read
the column]
2009
Election Results and 2010 Election
The following
were elected to one-year terms in the 2009 election of Medieval
Academy officers:
Herbert
L. Kessler, President; Elizabeth
A. R. Brown, First Vice-President; and Alice-Mary
Talbot, Second Vice-President.
The following
were elected to three-year terms as Councillors: Rita Copeland,
Robin Fleming, Carol Symes, and Nancy L. Wicker.
Sharon
Farmer and Paolo Squatriti were elected to two-year terms on
the Nominating Committee.
Election Procedure
Information
regarding candidates for the 2010 election can be found here.
Additional candidates may be nominated by petition. All candidates
must be members of the Academy. Nominating petitions must be
signed by twelve members of the Academy and must be received
at the Academy office by no later than 1 November 2009.
The ballot
for the 2010 election will be mailed in early December. The
due date for the receipt of ballots at the Academy’s office
is 12 February 2010. This date allows time both for members
to mail ballots and for staff to process them before the Academy’s
annual meeting, which will be held in New Haven, 18–20 March
2010.
Candidates for the 2010 Election (for brief bios, click
here)
For President
(one-year term): Elizabeth A. R. Brown, For First Vice-President
(one-year term): Alice-Mary Talbot, For Second Vice-President
(one-year term): Maryanne Kowaleski.
For Councillor
(three-year term): Albert Russell Ascoli, Lynda Coon, William
J. Diebold, Bruce Holsinger, Anthony Kaldellis, Karma Lochrie,
Mark Meyerson, and Nancy Wu.
The Nominating
Committee chooses one candidate for the presidential and vice-presidential
offices and two candidates for each vacancy on the Council.
The candidates for election to the next Nominating Committee
were chosen by Herbert L. Kessler, Academy President, who presents
two candidates for each vacancy on the committee. They are Thomas
Forrest Kelly, Sabine G. McCormack, Bissera Pentcheva, and Richard
Rouse.
The chair
of the Nominating Committee is appointed by the President from
among former members of the committee and serves a one-year
term. Rachel Fulton will be the chair for 2011.
Information
formerly listed in the Officers,
Fellows,
Committees
brochure is now available on this website (click on the item
you seek).
2009
CARA Awards
Awards
given by the Committee on Centers and Regional Associations
(CARA) for teaching excellence
and outstanding service and a call for 2010 nominations.
Leyerle-CARA
Prize
CARA gives
an annual
prize in honor of John Leyerle to support doctoral research
using University of Toronto collections.
CARA
Visiting Scholars List
Each year
the Medieval Academy of America's Committee on Centers and Regional
Associations (CARA) maintains a list of medievalists who are
visiting North America from other countries. The purpose of
the list is to provide a resource for those who would like to
invite foreign scholars to deliver lectures on their campus
but are unable to cover the expenses of international travel.
The current compiler of the list is Timothy C. Graham, Director
of the Institute for Medieval Studies at the University of New
Mexico (tgraham@unm.edu). If you would like to provide information
for inclusion in the list, please complete and submit the form
available at http://www.unm.edu/~medinst/cara/notificationform.html.
Click
here for list.
Feature:
"CARA
Mia," by
Tom Goodman, University of Miami
"Whatever
your institutional size, mission, or program commitment to the
field, the CARA meeting serves as an amicable, traveling venue
to check in with colleagues from the wide range of medieval
studies in the United States and Canada, including representation
from the European Union's CARMEN organization." [Read
the article]
Upcoming
CARA Meeting
The next
CARA meeting
will be held 1–3 October 2009 at Ohio State University.
Medieval
Academy Prizes (and
how to enter the competition)
The
winners of the 2009 Haskins Medal, the John Nicholas Prize,
and the Van Courtland Elliott Prize.
Medieval
Academy book subventions (and
how to apply for one)
The Medieval
Academy will partially fund three
new books in 2009; the Publications Advisory Board has also
accepted a new title for the series Medieval Academy Books.
Medieval
Academy Travel Grants (and
how to apply for one)
The Medieval
Academy's Committee on Professional Development has given out
five travel grants to independent
scholars or currently unaffiliated faculty.
Other
(non-Academy) Grants, Prizes, and Fellowship
Information
on these
awards is submitted by many persons and bodies and is posted
here without change beyond minor copyediting. Caveat emptor.
Honors:
Outstanding
Academy members continue to collect high honors.
Barbara Newman (Northwestern
University) has been the recipient of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
Distinguished Achievement Award. "Newman is a leader in the
field of medieval religious culture and has made pioneering
contributions to the study of women in medieval Christianity."
The awards are intended to underscore the decisive contributions
the humanities make to the nation's intellectual life. Amounting
to as much as $1.5 million each, the awards honor scholars who
have made significant contributions to humanistic inquiry and
enable them to teach and do research under especially favorable
conditions while enlarging opportunities for scholarship and
teaching at the academic institutions with which they are affiliated.
David Wallace
(University of Pennsylvania) has received a Guggenheim Fellowship
to edit "Regeneration: a Literary History of Europe, 1348–1418,"
to be published in two volumes by Oxford University Press.
Michael E. Kulikowski
(University of Tennessee) has received a ACLS Burkhardt Fellowship
from the National Humanities Center for his project The Rhetoric
of Being Roman: Fourth-Century Politics and the End of Empire.
Anne Latowsky
(University of South Florida) has received an NEH Faculty Research
Fellowship for 2009–2010 in support of her project Holy Land
Fictions: Journeys to Jerusalem and Constantinople in the Medieval
French Tradition.
Feature:
"News
from Dumbarton Oaks," by Alice-Mary Talbot, Dumbarton Oaks,
Emerita
"In
the fall of 2005 a new library building designed by Robert Venturi
was opened, permitting all the library collections to be integrated
and affording more office space for library staff and fellows."
. . . "Now
that the capital expansion and renovation project has been completed,
Dumbarton Oaks has been able to revive its summer school programs."
[Read the article]
The editor
welcomes up-to-date information from meeting planners about
their events. Please give us as much lead time as possible (a
skeleton notice can be posted well in advance of further details
but must include dates, place, and contact information). Post
notices to the editor (address at the foot of this page) or
e-mail the them directly to the editor (MA@MedievalAcademy.org).
It will soon be even easier: the Academy has plans to create
a form on this site for submitting conference details.
In an attempt
to counter the perception that the job market for medievalists
is static, the Academy's Committee on Centers and Regional Associations
(CARA) began in 2001 to assemble on a regular basis a
list of new university appointments within the U.S. (as
well as appointments of U.S.-trained academics abroad or of
non-Americans who take up posts in this country). The list later
came to include people who had recently moved from one position
to another.
If you
know of other medievalists in any field who have received recent
first appointments or moved from one job to another (even if
the job was taken up earlier in this decade), please send the
information to the editor (address at the foot of this page).
Graduate
Student Committee News
The GSC
is active and interested in contacting all student members of
the Academy. [Read the GSC news.]
Vagantes
Conference
Affiliated
with the Medieval Academy's Graduate Student Committee, Vagantes
is an annual traveling conference for graduate students studying
any aspect of the Middle Ages. Its goals include fostering a
sense of community among junior medievalists, providing a forum
for interdisciplinary scholarship, and showcasing the resources
of the host institution.
Travel
Grants
The Program
Committee for the annual meeting awards travel subventions for
meritorious papers written by graduate students. These
are the students who received travel grants for the Chicago
meeting in 2009.
Medieval
Academy Fellows
The 2009
Fellows election and invitation to nominate candidates for
the 2010 election (NB:
a new emeritus status has been established for Fellows).
Kalamazoo
News
The Medieval
Academy will host three sessions at Kalamazoo on the theme "Readers
and Religions in the Middle Ages."
News and
notes:
Change
of URL. Tufts Archives has changed the server for the
book by Madeline Caviness, Reframing Medieval Art: Difference,
Margins, Boundaries, Tufts University electronic book, 2001.
Its new Web address is http://cda.lib.tufts.edu/Caviness/
Translation
into Arabic: Another Medieval Academy first!
The National Center for Translation (NCT), a newly established
non-profit institution affiliated with the Ministry of Culture
in Egypt plans to translate into Arabic a Medieval Academy book
published in 1932, by John L. La Monte: Feudal Monarchy in
the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem 1100 to 1291. The Center's
books are subsidized and sold at a very low price so as to reach
the largest possible readership.
Suggest
a manuscript for e-codices: e-codices
(Virtual Manuscript Library of Switzerland ) would like to encourage
collaboration with researchers in the field of manuscript scholarship
by requesting that scholarly users suggest manuscripts that
are important to their research for possible digitization and
inclusion on the e-codices website. Using this collaborative
method the editors plan to make 25 additional medieval and early
modern manuscripts available on e-codices during the year 2010.
The manuscripts may represent any field of study, but should
be of major significance for research in the respective fields
(http://www.e-codices.ch).
A
warm welcome: The
Medieval Club of New York welcomes scholars and students in
any field of medieval studies in the greater New York area.
For over forty years, the club has been a locus of scholarly
exchange among specialists in all fields of medieval studies,
each year hosting six lectures at the CUNY Graduate Center and
sponsoring sessions at the International Congress on Medieval
Studies. Contact Emily Tai, treasurer (etai@qcc.cuny.edu) or
visit the Medieval Club website (http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/black/nymedieval.htm).
Free
digital images for scholars: The
National Gallery and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London,
along with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, have
made digital images of works from their collections available
for free for all scholarly publications (http://www.nationalgalleryimages.co.uk).
The V&A offers publishers of academic books and scholarly
articles direct download of more than 25,000 images directly
from its website (http://www.vandaimages.com). The Met has joined
with ARTstor to offer high-resolution images from its collections
for scholarly publication free of charge (http://www.artstor.org/what-is-artstor/w-html/services-publishing.shtml).
Four
new journals: Opuscula:
Short Texts of the Middle Ages and Renaissance is a peer-reviewed,
online journal/text series published by Classical, Medieval
And Renaissance Studies at the University of Saskatchewan and
specializing in short texts of the Middle Ages and Renaissance.
The editors seek submissions from scholars of a wide variety
of disciplines. The goal of the journal is to establish open
access to a substantial body of small but complete texts in
scholarly editions to researchers and educators. The first issue
will be published in September 2010. Contact: Frank Klaassen,
gen. ed., Opuscula, 718-9 Campus Drive, Saskatoon, SK, Canada
X7N 5A5 (frank.klaassen@usask.ca; http://opuscula.usask.ca)
The Journal
of Late Antiquity, which first appeared in 2008, is the
first international English-language journal dedicated to the
study of Late Antiquity writ large (250–750). It aims to
provide a venue for multi-disciplinary coverage of all the methodological,
geographical, and chronological facets of Late Angiquity, ranging
from Arabia to the British Isles. (http://www.press.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_late_antiquity/).
Issues
3 and 4 of the second volume of Peregrinations, a publication
of the International Society for the Study of Pilgrimage Art,
comprise a special double issue, issue 3 on Placing the Middle
Ages: Towards a Geography of Material Culture, and issue 4 on
the Bayeux Tapestry Revisited. The issue also features an enlarged
photobank of free images to download for teaching and research.
Edited by Sarah Blick (blicks@kenyon.edu), Vibeke Olsen, and
Rita Tekippe (rtekippe@westga.edu), Peregrinations is
free of charge (http://peregrinations.kenyon.edu).
postmedieval:
a journal of medieval cultural studies is
a cross-disciplinary, peer-reviewed journal in medieval studies
that aims to bring the medieval and modern into productive critical
relation. It is co-edited by Eileen Joy, and Myra Seaman. The
first issue, which will be published in April 2010, will deal
with the theme When Did We Become Post/human?
The Medieval Academy
News is published on a continuing basis by the
Medieval Academy of America
104 Mt. Auburn St., 5th Floor
Cambridge, MA 02138-5019.
Editor: Mary-Jo Arn
(MA@MedievalAcademy.org)
All items are subject
to editing.
©2009. The Medieval
Academy of America
