CONCURRENT SESSIONS VI (nos. 82-98), 0830-1015
82. Blackness, Race, and Representation in the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean
Emerson Hall 305
Organizer: Denva Gallant (Rice University)
Chair: Kristina Richardson (University of Virginia)
Denva Gallant (Rice University), “The Black Body as Site of Conversion”
Rachel Schine (University of Maryland),“Positioning Black Being through the Art of the Arabic Anthology”
Angela Zhang (Independent Scholar), “Creating Blackness”
83. Medieval Disability in Theory and Practice
Emerson Hall 101
Chair: Brandon Hawk (Rhode Island College)
Kisha Tracy (Fitchburg State University), “Medieval (Studies) in/on/about Crip Time”
Leah Parker (University of Southern Mississippi), “‘The Wonderful Sight of Christ’: The Crip Eschatology of Christ’s Wounds in the Old English ‘Christ in Judgment’”
Catherine Bloomer (Villanova University), “From Church to Comedy: Disabled Love in Guittone d’Arezzo and Guido Cavalcanti”
84. Practices of Co-Authoring in Medieval China
Sever Hall 203
Organizer: Antje Richter (University of Colorado Boulder)
Chair: Jack Chen (University of Virginia)
Alexei Ditter (Reed College), “Co-Authoring in Late Medieval Chinese Entombed Epitaphs (600–900)”
Amy Zhang (Harvard University), “Linked Verse Poetry in Medieval China and Japan”
Antje Richter, “Dependent Co-Authoring in Early Medieval Chinese Poetry”
Respondents: Elaine Treharne (Stanford University) and Xiaofei Tian (Harvard University)
85. Embodying the Past: Three Hermeneutics of Doing for Medieval Studies (Roundtable)
Holden Chapel
Organizer: Lauren Mancia (Brooklyn College)
Chair: Meredith Fluke (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)
Participants: Andrew Albin (Fordham University), Lauren Mancia, Matthew Sergi (University of Toronto)
86. Medieval Sounds and Soundscapes
Sever Hall 110
Chair: Anne Azéma (The Boston Camerata)
Mary Channen Caldwell (University of Pennsylvania), “Sailors’ Songs, Past and Present”
K. Meira Goldberg (Fashion Institute of Technology; Foundation for Iberian Music, CUNY Graduate Center), “‘Staging the Villager’: Some Considerations on Reconstructing an Andalusí Zéjel”
Emma Olson (Cambridge University), “Listening for Muslim War Trumpets in the Crown of Aragon’s Reconquista Narratives”
Kortney Stern (Goshen College), “The Fantasy of Voice and the Presence of Song: A Musical Approach to Gower’s Apollonius of Tyre and the Historia Apollonii”
87. Wood in Architecture of the Medieval World
Sever Hall 206
Organizer: Lindsay S. Cook (Pennsylvania State University)
Chair: Gabriela Chitwood (University of Oregon)
Suzanne Preston Blier (Harvard University), “Wood in Medieval African Architecture: How Support and Surface Intersect”
Nicola Camerlenghi (Dartmouth College), “Shiver Me Timbers: Earthquakes, Fires, and the Roof of St. Paul’s Basilica in Rome”
Lindsay S. Cook, “Out of Sight, Out of Mind? The Oaks of Notre-Dame”
88. Medieval Travel, Real and Imagined
Emerson Hall 108
Chair: Julia Verkholantsev (University of Pennsylvania)
James Simpson (Harvard University), “Apollonius of Tyre: Navigating the Anti-Romance Reefs, from Late Antiquity to the Eleventh Century”
Cristiana Filippini (Trinity College, Hartford, Rome Campus), “To Rome from Distant Lands: The Eleventh-Century Translation Scene in San Clemente”
Heather Blurton (University of California, Santa Barbara), “Romancing History in Richard Coeur de Lion”
Adán Ramírez-Figueroa (Harvard University), “How Do We Study Iberian Travel Literature in the Middle Ages?”
89. Visible Humility: Multidisciplinary Approaches
Sever Hall 210
Organizer: Francesca Galli (University of Zurich)
Chair: Jan Ziolkowski (Harvard University)
Francesca Galli, “Humility and its Optical Properties”
Silvia Negri (University of Zurich), “Embodied Humility”
Elena Berti (University of Zurich), “Unveiling the Homo Humilis: A Physiognomic Endeavor”
90. Medieval Women and Medicine
Sever Hall 213
Chair: Katharine Park (Harvard University)
Danijela Zutic (MacEwan University), “Doctor’s Little Helpers: Assistants, Mothers, and Midwives”
Naama Cohen-Hanegbi (Tel Aviv University), “Between Categories and Multitudes: Historicizing Perinatal Mental Distress in the Later Middle Ages”
Kaley Zinaty (University of Pennsylvania), “‘Women are More Knowledgeable about That’: Menstruation and Piety in the Mamluk Empire”
91. Jewish-Christian Relations in Late Medieval Iberia: The Old Spanish Bible of Moshe Arragel
Sever Hall 308
Organizer and chair: Luis M. Girón Negrón (Harvard University)
Andrés Enrique Arias (University of the Balearic Islands), “Arragel’s Language Choices as a Biblical Translator”
Francisco Javier Pueyo Mena (Instituto Cervantes, Harvard University), “Arragel’s Language Choices in his Prologue and Commentary”
Luis M. Girón Negrón, “Arragel as a Hispano-Jewish Exegete: His Old Spanish Glosses contra Nicholas of Lyra”
92. Sisters are Doin’ It for Themselves: Female Agency in Medieval Europe
Sever Hall 102
Chair: Matilda Bruckner (Boston College)
Francesca Guerri (The University of St. Thomas, Houston), “Gregory VII and Matilda of Tuscany: The Role of Women in Church Reform”
Elizabeth Lapina (University of Wisconsin-Madison), “Performing Diplomacy: Queen Margaret of Hungary and Frederick Barbarossa”
Elizabeth Hardman (Bronx Community College, CUNY), “Women’s Agency in the Contracts and Courtrooms of Fifteenth-Century Comtat Venaissin”
Megan J. Hall (University of Notre Dame), “From the Margins to the Center: Repositioning Women’s Knowledge in Medieval Romance”
93. Medieval Inventories and their Households
Emerson Hall 104
Organizer and chair: Christina Antenhofer (Paris Lodron University of Salzburg)
Sarah Ifft Decker (Rhodes College), “Jewish Homes, Jewish Culture? Jewish Household Inventories in the Late Medieval Mediterranean”
Christina Antenhofer (University of Salzburg), “Households in Late Medieval Castles: Reconsidering Castle Inventories from the Area of the Historic County of Görz”
Katherine L. French (University of Michigan), “Household Furnishings in Late Medieval Bristol, Norwich, York, and London”
94. Women and Devotion
Sever Hall 103
Chair: Jessica Barr (University of Massachusetts Amherst)
Vidya Dehejia (Columbia University), “Taking the Goddess as Daughter and the Role of Two Eleventh-Century Anukkis (Concubines): Facets of Women’s Devotion in Chola India”
Ailie Margot Posillico (Villanova University), “Exemplarity, imitatio Christi, and the Correspondence of Heinrich von Nördlingen and Margarethe Ebner (1332–1350)”
Maria H. Oen (Lund University), “Eloquent Ambiguity: Rhetorical Strategies in the Author Portraits of Catherine of Siena”
95. Models, Patterns, Exempla: Modes of Cultural and Artistic Transfer
Sever Hall 306
Organizer and chair: Olga Yunak (Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley)
Olga Yunak, “Heretics or Heroes: Novgorodian Strigolniki and Models of Sanctity”
Alice Isabella Sullivan (Tufts University), “Working Drawings: Transferring the Image in Byzantium and Beyond”
Justin Grosnick (Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley), “The Material-Spiritual Transfer of Deities across Space and Time”
Respondent: Justin Grosnick
96. Archaeology, Colonialism, and their Medieval Pasts
Sever Hall 106
Organizer: Michelle C. Wang (Georgetown University)
Chair: Daniel Donoghue (Harvard University)
Michelle C. Wang, “Silk Road Archaeology and the Search for an Indo-European Past”
Cordelia Hess (Aarhus University), “(No) Contact between Norse and Indigenous Peoples in the North Atlantic and Fennoscandia: Colonial Archaeology and the Construction of Ethnicities”
Bonnie Effros (University of British Columbia), “Nineteenth-Century Anglo-Saxonism: Antiquarianism, Primitives, and the British Empire in Victorian Liverpool”
97. Saints and Commemoration II
Sever Hall 214
Chair: Brian FitzGerald (Harvard University)
Guo Wu (Allegheny College), “Writing about Monks and Nuns: Historiography and Hagiography in Early Medieval China”
Sunil Persad (Stanford University), “Crushing Martyrs, Preserving Saints: Formulas of Identity-Making in Early Medieval Hagiography”
Joel Anderson (University of Maine), “Drafts of a Saint and a See: Layers and Contexts of the Libellus episcoporum Pharensium”
Albert Kohn (Princeton University), “Rabbi and/or Saint: Gamaliel in Twelfth-Century Western Europe”
98. Movement, Gender, and Topography: Strategies for Survival
Sever Hall 202
Organizer: Michelle Armstrong-Partida (Emory University)
Chair: Hussein Fancy (Yale University)
Elizabeth Casteen (Binghamton University), “Conversion, Migration, and the Limits of Freedom in the Late Medieval Western Mediterranean”
Elizabeth Urban (West Chester University), “Navigating Unfreedom: How Unfree Women Experienced Place and Mobility in Early Islamic History”
Susan McDonough (University of Maryland Baltimore County) and Michelle Armstrong-Partida, “Moving Men: Gender, Race, and Mediterranean Migration”
COFFEE BREAK, 1015-1030
PUBLICATION AWARDS AND PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS, 1030-1200
Sanders Theater, Memorial Hall
Presiding:
Peggy McCracken
Mary Fair Croushore Collegiate Professor of the Humanities, University of Michigan
First Vice-President of the Medieval Academy of America
PUBLICATION AWARDS
1030-1100
PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS
1100-1200
Sara Lipton
Professor of History, Stony Brook University
Thrones, Dominions: Identity, Authority, and Visible Things in the Medieval Mediterranean
(or, Things Fall Apart: What a Difference a Century Can Make)
LUNCH BREAK & EVENTS, 1200-1330
MAA Inclusivity and Diversity Committee Mentoring Lunch and Reception
12:00-1:15, Robinson Hall atrium [Sign up link here].
Guided tour of the Adolphus Busch Hall Medieval Plaster Cast Collection
with Lynette Roth, Daimler Curator of the Busch-Reisinger Museum.
12:15-1:30, Adolphus Busch Hall (29 Kirkland Street)[Sign up link here].
Concert of Byzantine Sacred Music
by the Romanos the Melodist Choir of Hellenic College Holy Cross, directed by Fr. Romanos Karanos.
12:15-1:15, Holden Chapel (Harvard Yard).
No registration required, but attendance is limited to 60 people.
Note that no food or drink is allowed in Holden Chapel.
CONCURRENT SESSIONS VII (nos. 99-114), 1330-1515
99. Celebrating New Scholarship for a New Century II (Lightning Session)
Emerson Hall 101
Organizer and chair: Rowan Dorin (Stanford University)
Participants: Shane Bobrycki (University of Iowa), Ardis Butterfield (Yale University), Tiago Viúla de Faria (NOVA Universidade de Lisboa), Sean Gilsdorf (Harvard University), Ingrid Nelson (Amherst College), Martha Rust (New York University), Melissa Vise (University of Virginia), and Hannah Weaver (Columbia University)
100. Out of Sight: Understanding Blindness in the Middle Ages
Sever Hall 110
Chair: Amy Appleford (Boston University)
Krista A. Milne (Leiden University), “Guide Dogs and their Owners in Medieval Artistic and Textual Representations”
Lorenzo Tunesi (Stanford University), “On and off the Margins: Discrimination and Praise of a Blind Musician in the Late Middle Ages”
Margaret McCurry (New York University), “Shadowed Sonorities: Division and De-vision in Gower’s Visio Anglie”
Courtney A. Krolikoski (Jacksonville University), “Avoculos et qui faciunt se avoculos: Blindness in Medicine and Society in Medieval Bologna”
101. Places Where Books Are Made: Collaborative Spaces and the Geographies of Book Production, in Memory of Derek Pearsall
Emerson Hall 108
Organizer: Linne Mooney (University of York)
Chair and respondent: Martha Driver (Pace University)
Linne Mooney, “Five Scribes in or near London Collaborating to Produce an English Literary Manuscript”
Kathryn Kerby-Fulton (University of Notre Dame), “Migrant and Metropolitan Scribes of Piers Plowman in the Writing Offices of London and Dublin”
Orietta Da Rold (Cambridge University), “Mapping Manuscript Geographies: Libraries and the Landscape of Medieval Book Production”
102. Animal Impulses: Beasts and their Meanings in the Middle Ages
Sever Hall 103
Chair: Jenny Adams (University of Massachusetts Amherst)
Nancy Wicker (University of Mississippi), “Human and Non-human Animals: Examining Who Is Represented in Early Medieval Scandinavian Art”
Karen Sullivan (Bard College), “The Bear Speaks Back”
Dominic Dold (University of Notre Dame), “From Elements to Organization: Thinking about the Body of Animals in Thirteenth-Century Theology and the Scientia de animalibus”
Rachel McVeigh (Harvard University), “Cranes as ‘Things’ in Late Medieval Chinese Poetry”
103. Late Medieval Quodlibetal Debates as Precursors of Annual Conferences: The History of the Genre with Two Probes into the Textual Corpus
Sever Hall 308
Organizer: Ota Pavlíček (Institute of Philosophy, Czech Academy of Sciences)
Chair: Riccardo Strobino (Tufts University)
Ota Pavlíček, “History of Quodlibetal Disputations at Faculties of Liberal Arts in Late Medieval Europe, c. 1380–1500”
Lukáš Lička (Institute of Philosophy, Czech Academy of Sciences), “The Usual and Unique in Optics-Related Disputations at Central European Faculties of Arts, 1350–1500”
Barbora Kocánová (Institute of Philosophy, Czech Academy of Sciences), “Comets as a Hot Topic in Medieval Academia and Vatican Manuscript Pal. Lat. 1438”
104. Medieval Landscapes, Real and Imagined
Sever Hall 202
Chair: Robin Fleming (Boston College)
Georgios Makris (University of British Columbia) and Fotini Kondyli (University of Virginia), “Beyond the Monument: Reconstructing the Byzantine Monastic Landscape of Kosmosoteira”
András Vadas (Columbia University/Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest), “Landscapes of Central Europe as Colonial Landscapes”
Summer Lizer (Claremont Graduate University), “‘Wide in þis world’: Time, Space, and Agency in Piers Plowman”
Chris Halsted (University of Maryland College Park), “Medieval Landscape, Modern Problem: The Curious Case of the German Rheas”
105. Cabinets of Curiosity: Collecting and Recycling Stories from Medieval China, Germany, and Japan
Sever Hall 106
Organizer: Martha Newman (University of Texas)
Chair: Xiaofei Tian (Harvard University)
Ting-fu Chen (University of Texas), “Otter-biographies: Local History and Zoopoetics in an Early Medieval Zhiguai Cycle”
Martha Newman, “Make Believe and Making-Believe: Monastic Stories as Fairy Tales”
Małgorzata Citko-DuPlantis (University of Tennessee Knoxville), “Imagining the First Collection of Japanese Poetry, Man’yōshū: How the Medieval Era Gave Modern Japan a Symbol of its Identity”
Respondent: Jan Ziolkowski (Harvard University)
106. Technologies and Sciences in/of the Middle Ages
Sever Hall 203
Chair: Stephen Harris (University of Massachusetts Amherst)
Anthony Harris (Clare Hall, Cambridge University), “The Evolution, Revolution, and Obfuscation of the Medieval Computus”
Edit Anna Lukacs (Austrian Academy of Sciences), “The Oxford Calculators of the Will”
Amy Ogden (University of Virginia), “The Future of Medieval Pain Management”
107. Cambridge Dantes, Black Studies, and a Japanese Dante
Sever Hall 213
Organizer: David Wallace (University of Pennsylvania)
Chair: Ambrogio Camozzi Pistoja (Harvard University)
David Wallace, “Dante in Harvard Square”
Jesse McCarthy (Harvard University), “Od ombra od omo certo: Black Studies in the Shadow of Dante”
Arielle Saiber (Johns Hopkins University), “A Japanese Dante: Kazumasa Chiba’s Paradiso (2019)”
108. Homiletics and Hagiography in Late Antiquity
Sever Hall 102
Chair: Eric Goldberg (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Cam Grey (University of Pennsylvania), “People Out Of Place: Some Consequences of Unfamiliarity in Late Antique Hagiographical Texts”
Jacob Horton (Yale University), “Non extranei sed domestici: De Sancto Maximo and the Rhetoric of Localness”
Richard Rush (Independent Scholar), “Landscape in the Life of the Jura Fathers”
Scott Bruce (Fordham University), “From Nisibis to the North: The Latin Sermons Attributed to Ephrem the Syrian”
109. The Structuring Currents and Transformative Interfaces: Water Experienced and Represented in (and beyond) Medieval China
Emerson Hall 104
Organizers: Suiyun Pan (Harvard University) and Hsienmin Mia Chu (Academia Sinica)
Chair: Valerie Hansen (Yale University)
Hsienmin Mia Chu, “Water as Rhetoric: Function and Forms of Water in Shuijing shu in Sixth-Century China”
Anne Feng (Boston University), “Flatland: Pure Land Topography and the Waterworks of Chang’an”
Suiyun Pan (Harvard University), “Invoking the Wave and Waving the Ink: Evolving Poetics of Water in Ekphrastic Poetry from Tang China”
Valerie Hansen, “A Tale of Two Ocean Storms: The Voyages of Faxian (413) and Ibn Battuta (1431)”
Respondent: Jon Felt (Brigham Young University)
110. The Middle Ages in Contemporary Crises and Debates
Sever Hall 306
Chair: Alex Mueller (University of Massachusetts Boston)
Lydia Shahan (Harvard University), “Race, Religion, and the Middle Ages in the Writings of Sylvia Wynter”
Sullivan Kaldwin (Binghamton University), “Silence in the Monastery: The Silencing of Genderqueer Voices in Le Roman de Silence and Genderqueer Hagiography”
Jonathan F. Correa Reyes (Clemson University), “Re-Defining the Human: Revisiting the Siege of Jerusalem”
111. New Perspectives on Medieval Iberia: Papers in Honor of Marie Kelleher (1970–2024)
Sever Hall 214
Organizer: Esther Liberman Cuenca (University of Houston Victoria)
Chair: Thomas Barton (University of San Diego)
Maya Soifer Irish (Rice University), “Neighbors and Rivals: The Tangled Economic Fortunes of Christians and Jews in Fourteenth-Century Seville”
Miriam Shadis (Ohio University), “City, Convent, Court: The Early Reforms of São Félix and Santo Adrião (Chelas) in Lisbon”
Michael Ryan (University of New Mexico), “Geralda de Codines, Women’s Knowledge, and Authority in the Fourteenth Century”
Respondent: Sarah Ifft Decker (Rhodes College)
112. Rethinking Medieval Sex and Gender
Emerson Hall 305
Chair: Kersti Francis (Boston University)
Erika Loic (Florida State University), “Winged Women in Medieval Art: Drawing the Lines between Monstrous and Angelomorphic Gender Expressions”
Johanna Alden (Boston College), “A Woman-Lord’s Precarious Immortality: Cámha’s Kinship in the Acallam”
Jason Jacobs (Roger Williams University), “Desublimating Men: What Drives the Old French Epic?”
113. Lively Affects: Ecological Perspectives on Medieval Nature Imagery
Sever Hall 210
Organizer: Francesca Southerden (Oxford University)
Chair: Katherine Travers (St. Hugh’s College, Oxford University)
Heather Webb (Yale University), “Botanical Affects in Catherine of Siena and Dante”
Francesca Southerden (Oxford University), “Fresh: A Medieval Lyric Ecology”
Marisa Galvez (Stanford University), “Intertwinings in Troubadour Song”
114. The Politics of Memory of the Medieval Celtic World II: Wales
Sever Hall 206
Organizer and chair: Celeste L. Andrews (Bard High School Early College-Newark)
Georgia Henley (St. Anselm College), “Memory and Prophecy in the Earliest Welsh Translations of Geoffrey of Monmouth”
Samuel Puopolo (Harvard University), “Welsh Goats and English Pigs: One Tudor Welsh Expatriate’s Memories of Medieval Anglo-Welsh Relations”
Celeste L. Andrews, “Antiquarianism, Medievalism, and Identity in Sixteenth-Century Wales”
FELLOWS INDUCTION CEREMONY AND PLENARY, 1530-1730
Sanders Theater, Memorial Hall
Opening remarks:
Eileen Sweeney (Boston College), Co-chair of the MAA 2025 Program Committee
Fellows’ Induction
(1530-1615)
Presiding: Kathryn Reyerson (University of Minnesota emerita), President of the Fellows
Orator: Richard Firth Green (The Ohio State University emeritus)
Scribe: Brigitte Bedos-Rezak (New York University)
Inductees
2025 Fellows
Marina Brownlee
Thomas Burman
Christopher Cannon
Peggy McCracken
Haruko Momma
Elizabeth Morrison
2024 Fellows
Richard Abels
Susan Boynton
Deeana Klepper
2025 Corresponding Fellows
Elisheva Baumgarten
Stefan Esders
Eric Palazzo
Elisabeth Van Houts
2021 Corresponding Fellow
Eva Schlotheuber
Fellows’ Plenary
(1615-1730)
Introduction:
Suzanne Preston Blier,
Allen Whitehill Clowes Professor of Fine Arts and of African and African American Studies, Harvard University
Wendy Belcher,
Professor of Comparative Literature and African American Studies, Princeton University
Ladders of Heaven: The Miracles of the Virgin Mary in Medieval African Literature and Art
CLOSING RECEPTION, 1800-2000
Milstein Conference Center, Harvard Law School, 1585 Massachusetts Avenue