CFP: 99th Annual Meeting of the Medieval Academy of America, University of Notre Dame, March 14–16, 2024, Deadline: 15th June 2023

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 conference will be entirely in person, though the plenary lectures and some other events will also be live-streamed.  

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. Exceptions can be given to individuals whose specialty would not normally involve membership in the Medieval Academy.


Location: The Medieval Institute has one of the preeminent library collections for medieval studies in North America. Notre Dame is located about two hours’ drive from Chicago, with commuter train service available. Scholars may wish to extend their visit and take advantage of opportunities for research or sightseeing.

Plenary Speakers:  Robin Fleming (Boston College), Bissera Pentcheva (Stanford), and Jack Tannous (Princeton). 

Themes:
Mapping the Middle Ages: Under this theme we invite explorations of how medieval people mapped their world and of how we, as modern scholars, have mapped or might map that world.  For example, sessions or individual presentations could focus on medieval cartography or the distortions of modern maps of the medieval world, but also on other kinds of medieval and modern mappings:  the creation of medieval cosmologies and cosmographies; the construction of boundaries, edges, peripheries, authorities, and jurisdictions; the positioning of marginal groups, of insiders and outsiders, of friends and enemies; the conjuring of frontiers between ‘civilizations’ across Eurasia; the figuring of past, present, and future, of ancient, medieval, and modern; the making of archives and libraries.

Bodies in Motion: This strand thematizes bodies (for example, animate bodies, celestial bodies, or material objects) as they move, whether through displacement or through movement within a space. Papers might consider celestial motion, mathematical models, music, and concepts of time; travel (e.g. for trade, pilgrimage, or war), migration and resettlement (voluntary or forced); the transmission of food, goods, art objects and diseases through patterns of human contact; bodies that transform or transcend categories; textual corpora, their material transmissions, and their transformations through translation and reception; habit, gesture, ritual, and the lived use of domestic, urban, political, or religious architectural spaces.

Communities of Knowledge: We invite papers exploring communities formed around the creation, dissemination, exchange, and preservation of knowledge in the medieval world. Papers might treat centers of learning and their students and teachers, including but not limited to the universities; virtual communities formed by epistolary networks, narrative traditions, dissident theologies, or political ideologies; communities defined in terms of medical knowledge; apocalyptic or prophetic or messianic communities bound by foreknowledge of things to come; the peripheries of knowledge, including the limits of literacy or belief; material supports for the transmission of knowledge, from shipping routes or urban spaces to fresco cycles or manuscript glosses; and the formation of political and legal knowledge in the Middle Ages and their impact on the constitution of authority.

The Medieval Academy welcomes innovative panels 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.

Proposals: Individuals may propose to offer a paper or propose a full panel of papers and speakers to fit one of the themes above.  Panels usually consist of three 25-minute papers, and proposals should be geared to that length. The Program Committee may choose a different format for some panels after the proposals have been reviewed. Panel organizers may wish to propose different formats for their panels, subject to Program Committee approval.

In order to be considered, proposals must be complete and sent in via the Submittable platform at this link: https://bit.ly/MAA2024-ND-MI

Paper proposals will need to include the proposer’s information (name; a statement of Medieval Academy membership, or statement that the individual’s specialty would not normally involve membership in the Academy; professional status; email address; postal address; home or cell and office telephone numbers) and paper information (title, abstract of no more than 250 words, session theme for which it should be considered, and audio-visual needs).

Session proposals: If a full panel is being proposed, the above information will be required for each paper, as well as for the session as a whole.  Session proposals may also include the name of the chair (with the relevant contact information) or ask that a chair.

If the proposer will be at a different address when decisions are announced in September 2023, that address should be included.

Submissions: The deadline is 15 June 2023.

Please do not send proposals to the Medieval Academy office or to the conference organizers. Contact MAA2024@TheMedievalAcademy.org with questions.

Selection Procedure: The Committee will review paper and panel proposals for their quality, the significance of their topics, and their relevance to the conference themes. The Program Committee will evaluate proposals during the summer of 2023 and the Committee will inform all successful and unsuccessful proposers and announce the program in September of 2023.

Program Committee Members

Thomas E. Burman, co-chair
CJ Jones, co-chair
Margaret Meserve, co-chair

Hussein Abdulsater
Christopher Abram
Alexander Beihammer
Jessalynn Bird
Jeremy Brown
Theodore Cachey
Eleonora Celora
Nina Glibetic
Robert Goulding
David Gura
Megan J. Hall
Marius Hauknes
Julio Hernando
Alexander Hsu
Peter Jeffery
Robin Jensen
Sarah Noonan
Stephen Ogden
Henry Stephan, O.P.
Wiebke Marie Stock
Alexis Torrance

Job Opportunity: Tutor, History of Art, University of Edinburgh (Deadline 2nd June 2023)

Applications are invited for Guaranteed Hours (GH) contracts for tutors in the History of Art at University of Edinburgh for the courses History of Art 1A: Art and Belief in Europe, 500 to 1700 (semester 1) and History of Art 1B: Art at the Crossroads of World Cultures, 500 to 1700 (semester 2).

Applicants should be familiar with the methods, theories and historiography of art history (and/or related disciplines) and committed to sharing them through passionate teaching. We especially encourage applicants with a background in History of Art, Visual Culture and Architectural History or affiliated disciplines to apply. The successful candidate may be enrolled on a PhD, within their maximum period of study, or may have completed their PhD studies, and/or have a proven record of teaching undergraduate students in the context of a University degree course.

Tutors prepare for and deliver weekly, in-person tutorials that run alongside course lectures. The direct teaching (contact) is minimum nine hours per semester, per tutorial group. Each group consists, on average, of 12 students. Tutors will have some flexibility in devising and leading teaching activities, but a programme of work co-ordinated with the course syllabus is provided.

Tutors are responsible for monitoring and assessing students’ progress on the course via two or three assessments per student (one formative and two summative).

Tutorials are in person. Ideally, we would like candidates who are available to teach both courses.

Follow the link included with this announcement to apply. CV and a cover letter required. Closing date 2 June. Interviews will be conducted mid-June.

Hybrid Lecture: Gilded Suns and Peacock Angels: Theatrical Materiality and Art in Fifteenth-Century Florence, Laura Stefanescu, Wednesday 14th June, 5pm BST

In fifteenth-century Florence, the phenomenon of religious theatre and ritual performance, promoted by adult and youth confraternities throughout the city, reached an unparalleled popularity, transitioning from the realm of devotion to that of the spectacular. The highlight of these performances was the materialisation of a multi-sensory heaven on stage and the appearance of its living angels (young Florentine boys) in their dazzling costumes. Painters living in the Santo Spirito quarter, where most of these activities took place, were actively involved in the creation of the apparatus for sacred plays. They were sometimes even members of the confraternities that produced the plays, as was, for example, Neri di Bicci, one of the most successful Florentine painters of the period. This talk aims to explore the connections between painting and the theatrical experience of heaven which shaped the visual culture of fifteenth-century Florence.

The seminar will be delivered before an audience and livestreamed. Separate booking links are  posted on Eventbrite for each form of attendance.

Booking Link to Eventbrite for livestreamed seminar

booking Link to Eventbrite for in-person seminar

New Book Publication: Tudor Liveliness – Vivid Art in Post-Reformation England by Christina J Faraday

A groundbreaking approach to the problem of realism in Tudor art

In Tudor and Jacobean England, visual art was often termed “lively.” This word was used to describe the full range of visual and material culture—from portraits to funeral monuments, book illustrations to tapestry. To a modern viewer, this claim seems perplexing: what could “liveliness” have meant in a culture with seemingly little appreciation for illusionistic naturalism? And in a period supposedly characterised by fear of idolatry, how could “liveliness” have been a good thing?
 
In this wide-ranging and innovative book, Christina Faraday excavates a uniquely Tudor model of vividness: one grounded in rhetorical techniques for creating powerful mental images for audiences. By drawing parallels with the dominant communicative framework of the day, Tudor Liveliness sheds new light on a lost mode of Tudor art criticism and appreciation, revealing how objects across a vast range of genres and contexts were taking part in the same intellectual and aesthetic conversations. By resurrecting a lost model for art theory, Faraday re-enlivens the vivid visual and material culture of Tudor and Jacobean England, recovering its original power to move, impress and delight.

Christina Faraday is a research fellow in art history at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, and an AHRC/BBC New Generation Thinker.

You can find more about Tudor Liveliness here.

CFP: Romanesque and the Monastic Environment, International Romanesque Conference, Deadline: 30th June 2023

The British Archaeological Association will hold the eighth in its series of biennial International Romanesque conferences in Valladolid from 8-10 April, 2024.

The theme of the conference is Romanesque and the Monastic Environment, and the aim is to examine how and why monastic spaces were created, embellished and used in the 11th and 12th centuries. While a particular approach to monastic planning can be observed in Carolingian Benedictine circles in the early 9th century – one in which ranges were organized on three sides of a garden with the church on a fourth – the extent to which this type of arrangement was widely adopted before the second half of the 11th century is unclear. Nor was it the only type of monastic plan in circulation. Semi-coenobitic orders, such as the Carthusians, had little use for ranges, even if the adoption of a garden surrounded by covered walks on four sides became more or less de rigeur in Latin monastic planning by c. 1100. When cloisters, chapter-houses, refectories, dormitories and work-rooms were established with clear relationships to each other and to the monastic choir, it becomes possible to speak of a core precinct, but what of other facilities, or precincts; infirmaries, outer courts, cemeteries, secondary cloisters, kitchens and gatehouses?

We welcome proposals for papers concerned with the design and functioning of monastic space in architectural, iconographical and liturgical terms, along with proposals which address choirs, their furnishings (stalls, pavements, altars), definition (screens, pulpita, railings), liturgical provision, and accessibility. Is processional use widely shared or locally specific? How and where is imagery used, or avoided? Should symbolic significance be attached to the appearance of buildings in monasteries beyond the church? Where and how was artistic production arranged? What are the preconditions for change?

Proposals for papers of up to 30 minutes in duration should be sent to Fernando Gutiérrez Baños and John McNeill on romanesque2024@thebaa.org by 30 June, 2023. Papers should be in English. Decisions on acceptance will be made by the end of July.

The Conference will be held at Valladolid University’s Palacio de Congresos ‘Conde Ansúrez’ from 8-10 April, with the opportunity to stay on for two days of visits to Romanesque buildings in the surrounding area on 11-12 April.

Lecture: “From Simone Martini (briefly) to Donatello: Recreating the Objects of the Goldsmith’s Art” by Amy Bloch, The Courtauld Institute of Art, 17:00 GMT

Donatello’s background and apparent training in goldsmithing make it unsurprising that he often represented examples of the goldsmith’s art in his large-scale sculptures. This lecture will consider, in reliefs and statues Donatello fashioned for Florentine, Sienese, and Paduan contexts, his recreation of objects typically produced by goldsmiths, including miters, chalices, processional crosses, parade armor, and framed and unframed medallions worn as personal adornment. It will explore how attention to Donatello’s representations of items crafted by goldsmiths can deepen our understanding of his art. Such items enrich the meaning of his sculptures through their iconography and, this lecture will suggest, because they can be experienced not only as constituent parts of artworks but also as independent objects. In the latter sense, their significance relies on the figures and/or the decoration that embellish them and on knowledge of how they were assembled, of the rich variety of materials employed in their production, and of how and when they were used. This lecture will begin with a brief discussion of several paintings by Simone Martini, who engaged in a variety of ways the art of goldsmithing and, in one conspicuous case, crafted an object that likewise straddles the line between representation and actuality.

Amy Bloch is a scholar of Italian Renaissance art whose current research focuses on the practice and regulation of goldsmithing in early Renaissance Italy. She has published, in addition to essays and a book on Lorenzo Ghiberti and his Gates of Paradise (Cambridge, 2016), articles and chapters on Donatello (including several contributions to the V&A exhibition catalogue), Jacopo della Quercia, Fra Angelico, Michelangelo, and on the decoration of the Florence Baptistery. She has also co-edited, and contributed to, two volumes of essays, the most recent (Cambridge, 2020) a collection of original studies of fifteenth-century Italian sculpture. She is Associate Professor of Art History at the State University of New York in Albany.

Organised by Dr Guido Rebecchini (The Courtauld) 

Register here.

Fellowship: Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study Residential Fellowships 2024-25 (Deadline 1st June 2023)

The Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study (SCAS) aims to provide optimal research conditions for curiosity-driven research. The Collegium is a scholarly community where Fellows pursue research of their own choosing in a context of interdisciplinary dialogue, discussion, and co-operation. Since its foundation in 1985, we strive to protect and nurture independent inquiry, collaborative and creative thinking, and to emphasize the importance of academic freedom world-wide. Governmental support and support from major research foundations allow our invited Fellows to engage in focused research and to collaborate across disciplinary boundaries.

Chartered by the Government of Sweden as an institute for advanced study, SCAS is a national scientific institution and resource. The Collegium is open to applications from scholars across the range of the human and social sciences, as well as from the natural sciences. SCAS hosts advanced senior scholars as well as early-career scholars. All candidates are assessed on the basis of their individual achievements and the quality and promise of their research proposal, including those who apply within the framework of a group. Every year presents a novel mixture of Fellows from all over the world who either work on their individual projects or who are part of a cluster of scholars with similar interests.

General Fellowship Programme
The Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study (SCAS) offers a General Residential Fellowship Programme, mainly in the humanities and social sciences, open to scholars from all countries. The programme gives fellows the opportunity to concentrate on their own research interests, free from the teaching and administrative obligations of ordinary university life. Fellows are, however, expected to be active members of the scholarly community of the Collegium and to participate in seminars and other academic events beyond their own fields of specialization. The Collegium encourages scholars from diverse backgrounds, institutions, and countries to apply.

At the time of application, the candidate must have held a PhD (or equivalent degree) for at least three years. As an applicant, you are not required to hold a university position at the time of application.

Scholars may apply for a full academic year (September – June) or one semester.

Barbro Klein Fellowship Programme
The Barbro Klein Fellowship Programme intends to advance the study of cultural diversity in a global perspective. The fellowship is open to scholars from across disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, with an emphasis on research on cultural and social diversity, cultural heritage and creativity, societal structures and public resistance, and varieties of cultural expressions in local and global perspective.

The programme gives fellows the opportunity to concentrate on their own research interests, free from the teaching and administrative obligations of ordinary university life. Fellows are, however, expected to be active members of the scholarly community of the Collegium and to participate in seminars and other academic events beyond their own fields of specialization.

The fellowship programme encourages, but is not limited to, applications from talented younger scholars in non-Western countries and of underrepresented gender. At the time of application, the candidate must have held a PhD (or equivalent degree) for at least three years. Applicants must have a promising track record of independent achievements beyond the post-doctoral level, including significant publications, and be active in international fora. As an applicant, you are not required to hold a university position at the time of application.

Scholars may apply for a full academic year (September – June) or one semester. 

For complete information and to apply, click here.

Fellowship: Census Fellowship, Reception of Antiquity, Berlin, Rome, and London (Deadline 31st May 2023)

The Institut für Kunst- und Bildgeschichte, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, the Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History, and the Warburg Institute, School of Advanced Study, University of London, are pleased to announce a fellowship in Berlin, Rome, and London, offered at either the predoctoral or postdoctoral level. These fellowships grow out of the longstanding collaboration between the Humboldt, the Hertziana, and the Warburg in the research project Census of Antique Works of Art and Architecture Known in the Renaissance.

The fellowships extend the traditional chronological boundaries of the Census and are intended for research and intellectual exchange on topics related to the reception of antiquity in the visual arts between ca.1350 and ca. 1900. In the context of the fellowships, the topic of the reception of antiquity is also broadly conceived without geographical restriction. Proposals can optionally include a digital humanities perspective, engage with the database of the Census, or make use of the research materials of the Census project available in Berlin, Rome, and London.

The Humboldt, the Hertziana, and the Warburg co-fund a research grant of 6–9 months for students enrolled in a Ph.D. program, or 4–6 months for candidates already in possession of aPh.D. Fellows can set their own schedule and choose how to divide their time between the three institutes, but they should plan to spend at least one month in residence at each of the three institutions.

The stipend will be set at ca. 1.500 EUR per month at the predoctoral level and ca. 2.500 EUR per month at the postdoctoral level, plus a travel stipend. The fellowship does not provide housing.

Candidates can apply via the Hertziana recruitment platform by uploading the requested PDF documents in English, German, or Italian by May 31, 2023, with details of their proposed dates for the fellowship during the academic year 2023/24 (July 2023–July 2024).

Funding: British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grants (Deadline 31st May 2023)

British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grants are available to support primary research in the humanities and social sciences. These awards, up to £10,000 in value and tenable for up to 24 months, are provided to cover the cost of the expenses arising from a defined research project.

Awards are open to postdoctoral scholars (or equivalent) who are ordinarily resident in the United Kingdom. Applications require the approval of the applicant’s employing institution, but are not limited to those of any particular status (e.g. Lecturer, Professor etc). Application may be made by independent scholars. Co-applicants may be from anywhere in the world, but the Principal Applicant must be ordinarily resident in the UK.

Grants are tenable for between 1 and 24 months.

Applications will not be considered for less than £500. The maximum grant is £10,000 over two years. Applications for collaborative or individual projects are equally welcome under this scheme. Applications from international groups of scholars are welcome, provided there is a UK-based scholar as lead applicant.

Funds are available to facilitate initial project planning and development; to support the direct costs of research; and to enable the advancement of research through workshops or conferences, or visits by or to partner scholars.

For complete information and to apply, click here.

Fellowship: Ad Astra Fellow, University College Dublin School of History (Deadline 26th May 2023)

In 2019 University College Dublin launched the UCD Ad Astra Fellowship scheme to welcome early career academics into its community of scholars. The scheme is now looking for the next thirty Fellows to join the Colleges of Business, Arts & Humanities and Health & Agricultural Sciences.

UCD is particularly interested in receiving applications from academics who will contribute to advancing one or more of the four themes identified in its current strategy: Creating a Sustainable Global Society, Transforming through Digital Technology, Building a Healthy World, and Empowering Humanity. 

The School of History welcomes applications from excellent candidates whose expertise expands and strengthens the School’s research and its undergraduate and graduate teaching programmes. The School has identified the history of the Middle Ages as a strategic area of interest in which it would particularly like to receive applications.

For complete information and to apply, click here.