Job Opportunity: Assistant Professor in Medieval History of Science and Religion, Purdue University (Deadline 1st November 2021)

Principal Duties: The Department of History at Purdue University invites applications for a tenure-track, assistant professorship in Medieval History of Science and Religion.  Ph.D. in History required. The successful candidate will develop and teach undergraduate and graduate courses in the history of the Medieval World as well as contribute to the intellectual life of the department. Applicants will be expected to enhance and complement the strengths of the department in the histories of science, technology, and medicine, gender, politics, and violence/conflict/Human Rights. The person who fills this position will also teach courses in the College’s general education program, Cornerstone Integrated Liberal Arts.

Qualifications: The Candidate must have a Ph.D. in history with a specialization in the history of Medieval Science and Religion. This position requires strong oral and written communication and proven ability to publish high-quality peer-reviewed research. Salary will be commensurate with training and experience.

The College and University: The College of Liberal Arts at Purdue University is embarking upon 40 faculty searches for positions to begin in Fall 2022. These positions will advance research within and across disciplines, and intersect with technology, data science, and engineering in relevant and important ways. These positions include teaching in our innovative, nationally-recognized Cornerstone Integrated Liberal Arts Program that educates students across the university.

Purdue University, the College of Liberal Arts and the Department of History are committed to free and open inquiry in all matters. Candidates are encouraged to address in their cover letter how they are prepared to contribute to a climate that values free inquiry.

Application Procedure


Applications must include the following items uploaded into Success Factors, the Purdue system for job applications, as PDF documents: 1) cover letter, with a discussion of teaching philosophy and research agenda; 2) Curriculum vitae; 3) the names of three referees (no letters please); 4) a writing sample of no more than 25 pages (which may be a dissertation chapter, article, or book); and, 5) a statement of commitment to diversity. Questions about the position should be directed to Melinda Zook, chair of the search committee, at mzook@purdue.edu.

Purdue University’s Department of History is committed to advancing diversity in all areas of faculty effort including discovery, instruction, and engagement. Candidates should address at least one of these areas in a separate diversity and inclusion statement, indicating their past experiences, current interests or activities and / or future goals to promote a climate that values diversity and inclusion.

Review of the applications will begin on November 1, 2021 and will continue until the position is filled. A background check is required for employment in this position. For additional information, contact Melinda Zook via email at mzook@purdue.edu.

Click here to apply.

Job Opportunity: Assistant Professor, Art and Architecture of the Medieval Mediterranean, Duke University (Deadline 1st November 2021)

The Department of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies at Duke University invites candidates to apply for a tenure-track faculty position in the History of Art or Architecture of the Medieval Mediterranean at the Assistant Professor level. Distinguished candidates at the early associate professor level will also be considered. Candidates at the rank of associate professor must have been in that rank for no more than three years at the time of their application.

The department seeks applications from individuals whose work makes significant contributions to medieval scholarship. All research fields—from local to global studies—that intersect with the Mediterranean world will be considered. Candidates whose interests include Islam and/or digital art history are particularly encouraged to apply.

Candidates submitting all required materials by November 1st, 2021 will receive full consideration. Candidates should include in their application a cover letter, cv, research statement, a teaching statement that includes how the applicant approaches diversity, equity, and inclusion, work sample (an article or a chapter), and the names and contact information of three references. 


The Department is committed to sustaining innovative and interdisciplinary teaching and research in an environment that is free from harassment and discrimination. The University does not tolerate harassment and discrimination; it also makes good faith efforts to recruit, hire, and promote qualified women, minorities, individuals with disabilities, and veterans. Duke is an Affirmative Action / Equal Opportunity Employer committed to providing employment opportunity without regard to an individual’s age, color, disability, gender, gender expression, gender identity, genetic information, national origin, race, religion, sex, sexual orientation, or veteran status. 

Click here to apply.

Online Lecture: ‘Promoting Conformity, Justifying Persecution: The Revival of Figurative Sculpture at the First Millennium’, by Deborah Kahn, Birkbeck Murray Seminar, 20th October 2021, 16:45 BST

The churches of Saint-Germain-des-Prés in Paris, Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire and Selles-sur-Cher contain some of the earliest figurative sculpture in stone since Rome. Even more exceptional is the fact that these carvings, which date from the 1020s and 30s, depict contemporary polemics: images of Muslims killing Christians in the lead-up to the Crusades, the Eucharist, not as a mere symbol (as the heretical canons burned at Orléans in 1022 believed), or the illustration of the conspiracy theory that the Jews were behind the destruction of the Holy Sepulcher, an event which occurred in 1009 without Jewish involvement.

These newly conceived relief sculptures must have seemed miraculous to contemporaries who were accustomed to wall-paintings in the decoration of their churches but who had never seen carved stone. The technology was the more astonishing because of its permanence in addition to its effectiveness in making the enemy tangible because the depictions protruded into space.  Thus, the revival of narrative sculpture was not merely the natural accompaniment of the new giant stone churches crafted from ashlar masonry, it was a vehicle to justify persecution and scapegoating; a tool to encourage social conformity in the wake of the millennium.

Deborah Kahn wrote her thesis at the Courtauld Institute.  She subsequently returned to America where she has taught at Boston University as an Associate Professor for twenty-five years.  She is the author of Canterbury Cathedral and its Romanesque Frieze, the editor of the Lincoln Frieze and its Spectator and has published widely on European sculpture as well as on medieval iconography more generally.  Her most recent book, The Politics of Sanctity: Figural Sculpture at Selles-sur-Cher appeared earlier this year.  She has recently turned her attention to the problem of copying and creativity in the art of the early middle ages.  Covid has left her pining medieval monuments – a condition little known in the medical world but widespread among American medievalists.

To register, please visit https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/deborah-kahn-promoting-conformity-justifying-persecution-tickets-184279544077

Call for Entries: ‘Encyclopedia of Medieval Royal Iconography’ (Deadline 31st December 2021)

Editor: Dr. Mirko Vagnoni
Publisher: MDPI (Basel)

The Encyclopedia of Medieval Royal Iconography sets out to do the first extensive collection of information on royal iconography covering the whole Middle Ages (476–1492). In particular, this book would like to collect entries about every medieval kingdom from Portugal to the Caucasus and from Iceland to North Africa following the different dynasties and with a particular emphasis on the most important kings who ruled during this period (please see the planned entries at the following link: https://encyclopedia.pub/book/detail/7). Every entry (more or less 4000 words for the main body text and approximately five pictures) should answer the following questions:


• Did the kings make use of royal images? Was it them, some members of their court, or other subjects that commissioned them?
• Which medium did the kings preferably use for their images (seals, coins, manuscripts, mosaics, frescoes, paintings, and sculptures)?
• In which context did the kings preferably place their images (in religious places as churches or monasteries or in lay places as palace, squares, or city-gates)?
• Which visibility did these images have? Who were they addressed to?
• Which iconographic themes did these images use?
• In which way did the royal images render symbols of power, attire, and the physical appearance of the king? Did they follow specific patterns or create new iconographies?

If you are interested in submitting an entry, please contact the following email address (mirkovagnoni@libero.it) by 31 October 2021 for more details.

Online Lecture Series: Robert Branner Forum for Medieval Art, Fall 2021

Robert Branner (1927-1973) was an art historian specializing in Gothic architecture and manuscript illumination. Active as an excavator, he made important discoveries in the chronology and style of French cathedrals, incorporating cultural historical tools into the method of design analysis that had more traditionally dominated architectural history.

Branner is remembered through the Robert Branner Forum, a student-run symposium sponsoring lectures several times a year that are open to the public. The Forum originated as a series of visiting lectures organized by Branner’s graduate students immediately after his death during the academic year as a way of continuing his courses. It has been supported by his family since that time.

For the 2021-2022 series, the fall lectures will be held remotely over Zoom. The format of spring lectures will be reassessed closer to 2022.

Fall 2021 Programme

Emanuele Lugli (Stanford University)
“Dragon Breath: On Paolo Uccello’s Saint George in London’s National Gallery”
Thursday, October 21, 2021, 3:00 pm EST
Register Here

Antony Eastmond (Courtauld)
Tuesday, November 2, 2021, 12:00pm EST
Register Here

Beate Fricke (University of Bern)
Friday, November 19, 2021, 12:00 pm EST
“Silk in Stone. Mediums of Labor, Craft, and Art”
Register Here

Find out more about the lecture series here.

Online Conference: Religion and Enmity: A RaceB4Race Symposium, Arizona State University, 19-22 October 2021

Enmity is a sustaining force for systemic racism, a fervent antipathy toward a category of people. Enmity exists at the nexus of individual and group identity and produces difference by desiring opposition and supremacy, imagining separation by force, and willing conflict. Enmity unfolds in different ways in different places, according to local logics of territory, population, language, or culture, even as these geographical divisions are subject to constant change.

This interdisciplinary symposium, hosted by Rutgers University, focuses on how premodern racial discourses are tied to cartographical markers and ambitions. The notions of enmity and region provide a dual dynamic lens for tracing the racial repertoires that developed in response to increasingly hostile contention between premodern cultural and political forces. The symposium will invite scholars to take up this intersection between region and enmity, and to examine how belief in difference, or the emergence of polarizing structures and violent practices, configured race thinking and racial practices in ways that are both unique to different territories and that transcend them.

Co-sponsored by Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, the Folger Institute at the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Arizona State University.

RaceB4Race® is brought to life by the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies in partnership with The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Division of Humanities at Arizona State University. RaceB4Race is underwritten by the Hitz Foundation.

Advance registration required.

Call for Papers: ‘Traveling in the Eastern Mediterranean, ca. 1300-1500: Politics, Agency and Production of Historical Knowledge and Space’, Sessions at the Seventh Biennial Conference Society for the Medieval Mediterranean, University of Crete, Rethymnon, 11-15 July 2022 (Deadline 7 November 2021)

Since the 11th century remarkable people flows, from Latin, Byzantine, Jewish and Muslim cultural circles, continuously shaped and reshaped the political, social, and cultural landscape of the eastern Mediterranean. Their travels, for political, military, economic, religious, or intellectual purposes, established contacts but also produced knowledge about both the travelers and the visited people and places, thus contributing to the negotiation of identities and alterities. The panel sessions will focus on the period ca. 1300 to ca. 1500 which witnessed both the continuity of the contacts between the aforementioned worlds, as well as important changes, such as the Mamluk and the Ottoman expansion and the Renaissance movement, which caused interruptions and disruptions in cultural encounters in the eastern Mediterranean.

The conference is interested in the production of historical knowledge and space through the interaction of politics and agency. The focus will be mainly on narrative texts which record the experience of travel (in the broader sense, including pilgrimage, trade, crusading, etc.) and relate the encounters with the Other in foreign places, while also illuminating the travelers’ perception of the past. The conference is also interested in investigating how the travelers documented and disseminated their experiences and how they tried to shape the mental horizons of the groups to which they belonged.

The organisers welcome case studies dealing with the Latin, Byzantine, Muslim and Jewish worlds. Contributions can range from historiography, literature, works of art etc. Interdisciplinary approaches will be highly appreciated. Through such case studies, the session would like to discuss broader questions, such as:

  • How did medieval people shape themselves as travelers and authors? How did they define their travel experiences and perceive the act of their narration?
  • Were there any politics of producing space among the Latin, Byzantine and Muslim political entities?
  • Did interactions between different localities lead to the shaping of a “global” eastern Mediterranean and, if so, how were various local spaces integrated into the latter?
  • How did the processes of historical knowledge and space production affect the formulation of normative concepts such as “Europe”, “West”, “East” and “Greece”?
  • What is the value of the aforementioned spatial concepts as analytical categories for the study of the late medieval period? In this vein, the discussion of modern analytical concepts, such as “global middle ages” and “proto-orientalism” are strongly encouraged.
  • How were historical discourses (selection of events, vocabulary, interpretive schemes, rhetorical conventions) shaped in this period?

It the organisers’ intention to publish contributions to the panel sessions, either as a self-standing volume or in the context of an appropriate journal.


Those interested in participating should provide a title and a brief abstract (ca. 150 words) by 7 November 2021 to the session organizers:
Dr. Eleni Tounta (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki) – tounta@hist.auth.gr
Dr. Nikolaos G. Chrissis (Democritus University of Thrace) – nchrysis@he.duth.gr

Job Opportunity: Assistant or Associate Professor in Medieval Studies, Macalester College (Deadline 5th November 2021)

The Macalester College Department of English invites applications for a tenure-track position at the Assistant or Associate Professor level in Medieval Studies; secondary fields of interest are open. The successful candidate will join an internationally recognized and collegial faculty in an innovative department with interconnected literature and creative writing programs; will teach undergraduates at all levels from introductory courses to senior honors projects; will receive robust support for their research agenda; and will have ample opportunities for new course development. 

Requirements: PhD plus a publication and teaching record commensurate with career stage. 

The position will begin in Fall 2022. For more information and to apply, click here.

Postdoctoral Fellowships: Getty/ACLS Postdoctoral Fellowships in the History of Art, 2022-2023 (Deadline 27 October 2021)

The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) invites applications for Getty/ACLS Postdoctoral Fellowships in the History of Art, made possible by the generous support of the Getty Foundation. These fellowships are intended to support an academic year of research and/or writing by early career scholars from around the world for a project that will make a substantial and original contribution to the understanding of art and its history. The ultimate goal of the project should be a major piece of scholarly work by the applicant. ACLS does not fund creative work (e.g., novels or films), textbooks, straightforward translation, or pedagogical projects.

The ACLS will award 10 fellowships, each with a salary-replacement stipend, plus funds for research and travel during the award period. The fellowships are portable: a fellow may elect to take up the award at any appropriate site for the work proposed, including abroad. Awards also will include a one-week residence at the Getty Research Institute following the fellowship period.

Getty/ACLS Postdoctoral Fellowships may not be held concurrently with other fellowships and grants, though they may be combined with sabbatical. Tenure of the award must encompass the entirety of the 2022-23 academic year, during which fellows must devote themselves to full-time research and writing. The residence for 2022-23 Getty/ACLS Fellows will be held in July 2023 (the exact date is to be determined).

Eligibility

  • Applicants must have a PhD that was conferred between September 1, 2016 and December 31, 2020.
  • Applicants who earned their PhDs in and/or are currently employed in any humanistic field may apply, so long as they demonstrate that their research draws substantially on the materials, methods, and/or findings of art history, and contributes to the field. Scholars may propose new approaches to art historical scholarship and/or explore connections between art history and other humanistic disciplines.
  • This program welcomes proposals from applicants without restriction as to citizenship, country of residency, location of work proposed, or employment.

For complete application information and to apply, visit https://www.acls.org/Competitions-and-Deadlines/Getty-ACLS-Postdoctoral-Fellowships-in-the-History-of-Art.

Conference: ‘(In)Materiality in Medieval Art’, 14th Jornadas Complutenses de Arte Medieval, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 11th and 12th November 2021

Ovid’s aphorism ‘Materiam superabat opus’, evoked throughout the Middle Ages and beyond, reveals the special consideration given to skill, technique and craft in the artistic creation processes. Thus, ingenuity and mastery have been privileged qualities in our approach to works of art, according to a restricted vision assumed by Art History as a discipline. However, both the aesthetic reflections and the documents related to artistic commissions in the Middle Ages show the great importance given to the material and sensory aspects of artefacts and monuments. In line with this perception, once again valued in light of the material turn of the discipline in the last decades, the 14th Jornadas Complutenses de Arte Medieval propose to focus on materiality as an essential factor in the artistic production, as well as on the poetics of immateriality and the intangible condition of the aesthetic experience.

Beyond the technical analyses, which in recent decades have allowed us to reconsider common places in the study of the medieval artistic production, this congress aims to establish transversal debates in order to open up new perspectives. In this sense, the material conditions of artistic production (properties, supply, cost, transport or technology, among others), as well as their reflection in the written sources –from technical treatises to documentary and literary references– will be discussed. On the other hand, the congress will address issues related to the sensorial features of the medieval works of art and their relationship with intangible aspects, such as the material and chromatic qualities, the incidence of light, the acoustic and olfactory effects, and the impact of the natural environment. The poetics of the materials, their meaningful uses, and the symbolic values ​​of the immaterial will have room in the debates. Likewise, it will be of interest to consider new interpretative concepts, such as transmateriality and transmediality, which may include the morphological transformation of elements across different materials, the transfer and circulation of ornamental patterns, or the physical traces of mental, invisible or transient phenomena. Contributions that address non-hegemonic and / or under-treated practices and media in historiography are especially welcomed.

Proposed topics:

– Material conditions of artistic creation.

– Underrated practices and media.

– Poetics and semantic uses of the material and the intangible.

– Cultural history of materials.

– Sensoriality and immateriality.

– Transmateriality and transmediality.

Confirmed keynote speakers: Miquel Àngel Capellà Galmés (Universitat de les Illes Balears), Vincent Debiais (CRH – Centre national de la recherche scientifique), Beate Fricke (Universität Bern), Ruggero Longo (Bibliotheca Hertziana, Max-Planck-Institut für Kunstgeschichte), María Teresa López de Guereño Sanz (Universidad Autónona de Madrid), José Miguel Puerta Vílchez (Universidad de Granada), Laura Rodríguez Peinado (Universidad Complutense de Madrid), Elisabetta Scirocco (Bibliotheca Hertziana, Max-Planck-Institut für Kunstgeschichte), Noelia Silva Santa-Cruz (Universidad Complutense de Madrid), Ana Suárez González (Universidade de Santiago de Compostela), Jorge Tomás García (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid).

Click here to register.