Medieval Studies Fellowship Awardee: Zofia Ahmad

"My past research has focused on imperial structures and identity, as well as interactions across Eurasia in the ancient and medieval time periods and the impact of these interactions on understandings of space and the ‘other.’ I am particularly interested in the role that trade and the transportation of physical goods, people, and ideas played in the way individuals of all classes understood distant lands and cultures. I’m hoping to use my time here in Bloomington to merge my past experience with GIS and other digital methods with my historical interests to continue studying questions of imperial identities in antiquity from a diverse set of perspectives."

Clifford Flanigan Memorial Fellowship: Josh Harris

"The Clifford Flanigan Memorial Fellowship enabled me to attend the Summer School in Scandinavian Manuscripts in Reykjavík, in which I prepared a new edition of a text (Stúfs þáttr) preserved in some 41 Medieval and post-Medieval manuscripts. I learned a great deal about Medieval Norse studies from my teachers and fellow students, and I even came away from the course with a dissertation topic!"

Cox Travel Awards

• Zachary Engledow (ENG): Presented at Leeds International Medieval Congress
• Maggie Gilchrist (ENG): Presented at Biennial New Chaucer Society Congress in Durham
• Eduardo Acarón Padilla (CMLT, CEUS): Presented at Middle Eastern Studies Association
• Pouyan Shahidi (MELC): Presented at Middle Eastern Studies Association

McRobbie Award

• Kayla Lunt (ARTH): Leeds International Medieval Congress

Grants-in-Aid

• Takatomo Inoue (HPSC)
  • "My research explores alchemy in medieval Islam as a discipline from the perspective of the history of science, focusing on experimentalism. In the research, I specifically shed light on the alchemy of Abū Bakr al-Rāzī (d. 925), one of the alchemists who has written on laboratorial work without spiritual or symbolic expression."
• Tyler Nighswander (ANTH, MELC)
• Lindsay Ruth (CEUS)
  • "My project was a paper arguing that, in Syriac Christian literature, the Bride of Christ was a higher level of holiness for women than virgin, and that furthermore, the Bride of Christ did not have to be a virgin to obtain this status. This paper was presented at the XIII Symposium Syriacum in Paris, France on July 4th, 2022."
• George Yfantidis (ARTH)
  • "I used the funding to attend the 2022 session of the Cappadocia in Context Program sponsored by the Koç University’s Research Center for Anatolian Civilization. The two week program included visits to Late Antique, Byzantine, and Post-Byzantine archaeological sites and churches, with an emphasis on the famous rock cut churches of Cappadocia."
• Yiwen Zheng (EALC)
  • "My project uses digital humanities methods (computationally detecting language change) to locate Chinese medieval miscellanies that do not fit the time periods that they were originally assigned. I then attempt to explain how and why these miscellanies were different from their contemporary works through literary and historical approaches."