Annual Meeting of the Medieval Academy of America
2024 Annual Meeting of
The Medieval Academy of America
Hosted by the Medieval Institute, University of Notre Dame
MARCH 14–16, 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 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: