Director's Message

To all newcomers and current MEST members and collaborators, welcome back! I am excited to be starting my directorship for what promises to be another great year for Medieval Studies at IU. We already have several events planned for 2024-2025. On this page you'll be able to find further information on what to expect in the fall semester, including our annual welcome Garden Party (where, once again, everyone gets a chance to select a free medieval studies book, “tolle lege,” and to enjoy pastries and other catered refreshments). We will also be participating in the IU Arts and Humanities Council’s First Thursday to be held on November 7, from 4-7PM. The event is scheduled to take place at the Fine Arts Plaza around Showalter Fountain (weather permitting!), where we will again have a chance to share the Global Middle Ages with students and colleagues. I have additionally arranged for MEST to make our presence known at the upcoming College Expo, Wednesday, August 21st from 2-4PM at Woodlawn Field.

Be sure to check your emails and the "Livewhale" MEST calendar for the announcement of Spring semester events like our annual Mediaevalia at the Lilly lecture and workshop. Also this Spring, MEST will also be collaborating with our newly reconstituted Graduate Student Advisory Committee (GSAC), which is spearheading the Spring Symposium and making plans for a keynote speaker. The theme they have chosen for the Symposium is “Borderlands: Reimagining the Medieval Periphery.” I will be writing soon with more information, but I encourage all graduate students and faculty interested in participating in the Symposium to contact me (rdgiles@iu.edu).

We owe a great debt of gratitude to Prof. Jeremy Schott who just completed his term as MEST Director this summer, having expertly guided the ship during some challenging years. I would also like to express my thanks to the members of the Executive Committee whose service continues to be essential to the Institute. I am especially grateful for all the help they have provided me—along with the guidance of our outgoing MEST assistant, Erin Walden—as I get my bearings in this new position. Finally, I am pleased to announce that Ali Alsmadi will has joined MEST staff this year to serve as Editorial Assistant for The Medieval Review.

Sincerely,

Ryan Giles

Upcoming Events

November 7: Picturing the Global Middle Ages at the First Thursdays Festival

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November 1 and 2: Premodern Waste/Lands

September 27, 12:30-3PM: Medieval Studies Garden Party

MEST GSAC Event: Pages and Pints

Hosted by Medieval Studies Institute's Graduate Student Advisory Committee. Join us for pints and discussion of all things medieval! The brewery is located at 1703 N College Ave, Bloomington, IN 47404.

Medieval to Modern Irish Film Series

For more information about this event, please contact Joshua Pontillo: jpontill@iu.edu

Graduate Student Awards

We are happy to announce that two of our MEST graduate awards are officially open. This year, the College has required that we switch to the online IU Scholarships system which means that deadlines (February 16) will arrive earlier than they have in previous years. Right now, our donor-funded awards are open, MEST travel grants/aid will open at a later time. Detailed instructions for applying to the Clifford Flanigan Memorial Award and the McRobbie Graduate Fellowship are below. We encourage you to apply.

Clifford Flanigan Memorial Fund

Due to donor intent, this award is restricted to those graduate students who have completed or are in the process of completing a MEST minor and/or certificate. Award amount will be determined by the applicant’s budget proposal.

This fund was established in honor of Clifford Flanigan (1941-1993), professor of comparative literature and a founding member of the Medieval Studies Institute. In memory of his commitment to facilitating opportunities for graduate students, the fund provides travel assistance for graduate students studying the Middle Ages to attend conferences.

Applicants must submit:

Conference Abstract
Budget Proposal (including name of conference, date, location, relevant conference information, and budget)

Andrea S. McRobbie Graduate Fellowship in Medieval History

This award is open to all advanced graduate students in the College of Arts & Sciences regardless of MEST affiliation. Applicants must demonstrate deep engagement with medieval studies through their work and scholarship.

This fellowship is presented by the McRobbie family and the Medieval Studies Institute in memory of Andrea McRobbie’s interest in medieval studies. The mission of the fellowship is to support an advanced graduate student engaged in “scholarship in medieval history, specifically some aspect of its social history or some theme in medieval social history related to its art, philosophy or literature.”

Applicants must submit:

A nomination written by a MEST-affiliated faculty member familiar with your work in medieval studies. Applicants will enter the name and contact information of this faculty member in their application and IU Scholarships will send an email to the recommender with instructions on how to upload to the nomination.
Personal Statement which speaks to the student's “scholarship in medieval history, specifically some aspect of its social history or some theme in medieval social history related to its art, philosophy or literature.”

To apply: Submit your materials through IU Scholarships, https://one.iu.edu/task/iu/scholarships

You will be asked to fill out your general application before you get to the MEST-specific applications. In your general application you do not need to fill out the scholarship essay. MEST will only review the essay submitted for each award and will not consider the information requested by the general application.
To locate the awards once you have submitted your general application: select the Opportunities drop down -> All -> search for the name of the awards (Flanigan or McRobbie)
Submit materials
Reference requests for the McRobbie award will be routed to the faculty member.

Past Events

March 22, 2024: Graduate Conference

Conference Poster

Please join us for “Time and Things: New Perspectives on the Premodern World,” an Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference Co-Sponsored by the Program in Ancient Studies and the Medieval Studies Institute. The event will take place all day followed by a reception at the Blankspace Gallery (located in Bonne Fête). Stay tuned for a schedule and more details which will be posted to the conference page.

Keynote Speaker: Gregor Kalas (University of Tennessee at Knoxville): "Eighth-Century Rhetoric on Social Justice and the 'Penitentiary' at San Nicola in Carcere, Rome." Gregor Kalas investigates the architecture of Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages with a particular focus on the post-classical adaptations of ancient buildings and monuments.

March 7, 2024: Sonja Drimmer Book History Talk

On Thursday, March 7 at 4.00 pm in Maxwell Hall 222, Associate Professor of Art History Sonja Drimmer (U Mass, Amherst) will give a talk related to her work on the surviving mss. of the St. Albans' Chronicle (including the Lilly Library copy).

Sonja is the author of The Art of Allusion: Illuminators and the Making of English Literature, 1403-1476 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), and one of the leading next generation of art historians. Her work regularly deploys the history of the material book to consider contemporary debates in Media Theory, up to and including the bogus uses of art via technologies known as Artificial Intelligence. She writes widely in scholarly and public venues and is especially appreciated as the author of the hilarious social media series (inspired by the film Zoolander): 'What is this? Westminster Abbey for Ants?" staged via an impressive array of funny photographs of architectural models from around the world.

For more, see her website.

February 28-29, 2024: Mediaevalia

Join the Lilly Library and MEST for the annual Mediaevalia public lecture and workshop.

We are pleased to welcome Dr. Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh to present her talk, "Survivor Object: The modern life of a Medieval Manuscript, from Church to Museum."

The public lecture will be held at the Lilly Library on Wednesday, February 28
from 5:00-6:15 PM followed by a reception. The workshop will be on Thursday, February 29 from 10:30 AM-12:00 PM. More details to come!

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Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh is Professor of Art History at the University of California, Davis. She researches the visual cultures of the Middle East, including architectural preservation, museums, and cultural heritage. Her first book, on the architecture of Aleppo, Syria, received the book Award for urban history from the Society of Architectural Historians. Her second book, The Missing Pages : The Modern Life of a Medieval Manuscript, from Genocide to Justice, published by Stanford University Press in 2019, is the only book to win awards from both the Society for Armenian Studies and the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association . The book also won the Gold Medal in World History from the Independent Publisher Book Awards, and it was shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing (non-fiction).

Her scholarly publications have won Best Article Prizes from the Syrian Studies Association and from the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association. Her research has been supported by fellowships from the J. Paul Getty Trust, National Endowment for the Humanities, Fulbright-Hays, Social Science Research Council, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, and the President of the University of California. Professor Watenpaugh has served on the boards of the Society of Architectural Historians, the Historians of Islamic Art Association, the Syrian Studies Association, and is currently on the board of the American Research Institute of the South Caucasus. She is a fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation as well as a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar.

In addition to scholarly essays, Heghnar Watenpaugh’s writing has appeared in Newsweek and The Los Angeles Times and was featured in a BBC podcast series about cultural heritage destroyed during the Syrian conflict. In recognition of this work she was selected as a Public Scholarship Faculty Fellow by the University of California Davis.

February 8-9, 2024: Translating History: A Workshop on History, Historians, and Translation

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Please join for a series of workshops featuring emerging scholarship on translation and historiography during the “long” late antiquity of the Eastern Mediterranean and Near East (4th-10th centuries). You are welcome to join us for any and all sessions below. Presenters include Leonora Neville, Edward Watts, Rebecca Falcasantos, David Maldonado Rívera, Martin Shedd, Sean Tandy, and Giorgio Nicosia. Light breakfast will be served both days. Lunch available on February 8. See the full schedule on this event page. If you would like access to pre-circulated materials, email MEST@iu.edu.

Contact Us!

Do you want to get more involved with MEST? Do you have news/events to advertise? Do you want to collaborate with us for an event? Do you want to minor or get a certificate in medieval studies? Reach out to mest@iu.edu for all questions and concerns.

If you would like to update you graduate or faculty profile, please email mest@iu.edu.

The Medieval Studies Institute

Newsletter

Director's Message

Upcoming Events

November 7: Picturing the Global Middle Ages at the First Thursdays Festival

November 1 and 2: Premodern Waste/Lands