Newsletter

Director's Message

Welcome one and all to another semester with the Medieval Studies Institute! This promises to be an action-packed semester featuring many opportunities to engage with everything medieval at IU. Below, you’ll find information on our upcoming events including a two-day translation and historiography workshop featuring scholars from around the world, the annual Mediaevalia lecture and workshop at the Lilly Library with Dr. Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh (University of California, Davis), and the exciting return of our Graduate Symposium, co-hosted with the Program in Ancient Studies. Don't forget to mark your calendars!

We are grateful to our returning MEST Executive Committee members, Profs. Deborah Deliyannis, Heather Blair, and Joey McMullen, as well as to our new members, Profs. Kalani Craig and Shannon Gayk. Thank you all!

Finally, this is my last semester as Director of MEST. I have truly enjoyed getting to work with the wonderful faculty, students, and staff who compose our vibrant Medieval Studies community at IU. I would especially like to thank Kalani Craig, (Associate Director from 2021-2023), Natalie Levin, Nicolò Sassi, Erin Walden, (Assistants to the Director), Kayla Lunt, and Emily Clark. I have greatly valued the chance to serve as Director, and I will be excited to see MEST grow and flourish in the coming years. Thank you for entrusting me with this position and for making my time at MEST so rewarding.

As always, don't hesitate to reach out with questions and concerns. When possible, we try to sponsor medieval events on campus, so let us know if you would like help hosting, planning, or publicizing an event! 

Sincerely,

Jeremy Schott

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. 

Upcoming Events

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

Screenshot-2024-01-23-at-1.00.29-PM.png

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.

February 28-29: 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!

Heghnar-Watenpaugh-4357-3--copy-1.jpg    Canon-Tables-Zeytun-Gospels-Getty-fol.-6-1.jpg

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.

March 7: 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.

March 22: 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.

Ongoing: Chaucerian Film Series

Screenshot-2024-01-23-at-1.05.06-PM.png

Hosted by Ben Hoover and Professor Shannon Gayk, join them for an ongoing film series. MEST will be providing pizza!

Past Events

Medieval Studies Garden Party

Thank you for joining us at our Garden Party last semester!

Screenshot-2024-01-23-at-1.09.07-PM.png