CONCURRENT SESSIONS I (nos. 1-15), 1000-1145
1. Charles Homer Haskins, Then and Now: 1925-2025
Emerson Hall 104
Organizer: Jennifer Paxton (The Catholic University of America)
Chair: Robert Berkhofer (Western Michigan University)
Jennifer Paxton, “The Medieval in the Making of Modern Europe: Charles Homer Haskins and the Treaty of Versailles”
Amy Livingstone (University of Lincoln), “Charles Homer Haskins, Charters, and Gender”
Carolyn Twomey (University of Nebraska Lincoln), “Charles Homer Haskins at 100: Materials of Medieval History in America”
Respondent: Thomas N. Bisson (Harvard University)
2. Multimedial Communication in Medieval Manuscripts
Sever Hall 213
Organizer: Maile Hutterer (University of Oregon)
Chair: Diane Reilly (Indiana University Bloomington)
Maile Hutterer, “Building the Page: The Use of Architectural Language in Painted Frames”
Sarah Ann Long (Michigan State University), “Altered Meanings and Local Customs in Adam de la Bassé’s Ludus Anticlaudianum”
Jay Diehl (Long Island University), “Making Mediascapes: The Visual Strategies of Monastic Booklists”
3. Music Theory in the Medieval World
Sever Hall 206
Chair: Suzannah Clark (Harvard University)
Barbara Haggh-Huglo (University of Maryland College Park), “The Transmission of Knowledge about Music: The School of Liège (c. 1050-1200) Revisited”
Charles M. Atkinson (Ohio State University/Universität Würzburg), “On Rhetoric and Change of Mode in Plainchant East and West”
Mohammed Sadegh Ansari (SUNY Geneseo), “Science in the Margins: Ms. Fatih 3661’s Marginal Notes as a Source for History of Musical Science in the Medieval Islamic World”
4. Transcultural Entanglements in Medieval Art and Material Culture
Sever Hall 210
Organizer: Yingxue Wang (Harvard University)
Chair and respondent: Nancy Steinhardt (University of Pennsylvania)
Yingxue Wang, “Birch Bark, Beetles, and Beads: Ecological and Global Entanglements of Silla Art in the Maripgan Period (356–514)”
Petya Andreeva (Vassar College), “The Politics of Object Itineraries in the Golden Horde (1242–1502): From Nomadism to Globalism”
Aya Nakama (Kyoto University), “Arabic Optics and Representations of the Sacred in the Works of Jan van Eyck (c. 1395-1441)”
5. Saints and Commemoration I
Sever Hall 214
Chair: J.R. Webb (Bridgewater State University)
Laura Wilson (Antiochian House of Studies), “Commemorated Ascetic, Forgotten Deacon: The Selective Memory of St. Domnika”
Omri Matarasso (Princeton University), “Monastic Networks in Early Medieval Mesopotamia”
Douglass Hamilton (Fordham University), “Founder’s Legacy: The Monastic Influence on the Burgundian Legend of Girard of Roussillon”
Theresa Rice (University of Notre Dame), “The Afterlife of Adalbert of Prague: Re-Membered Relics in Medieval Polish Christian Identity”
6. Multiple and Cross-Cultural Marriages for Elite Women, Fifth-Twelfth Centuries
Sever Hall 103
Organizer: Therese Martin (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Madrid)
Chair: Sara McDougall (John Jay College Graduate Center, CUNY)
Cecily Hilsdale (McGill University), “Gold, Grain, and Ivory: Galla Placidia’s Marriages and the Consolidation of Imperial Dynasty”
Valerie Garver (Northern Illinois University), “Judith and Eadgifu: Royal Widows and their Re-Marriages, 856–951”
Fiona Griffiths, “A Woman/Wife for the King’s Son?: ‘A Captured Slavic Noblewoman’ on the Elbe Frontier in the Tenth Century”
Therese Martin, “Urraca and her Consorts: Widowed by a Count, Divorced from a King, Allied to Another Count, and Sought by a Muslim Ruler?”
7. Playing with/at the Medieval
Sever Hall 306
Chair: Anna Wilson (Harvard University)
Isabella Neubauer (University of Texas at Austin), “‘All This Nasty Business’: Fighting Medievalist Legends in Once & Future”
Elisabeth Herbst Buzay (Trinity College), “Heroine Knights, Struggles for Survival: A Medievalist Perspective in Francophone Video Games”
Lorena Alessandrini (Harvard University), “From Kaer Morhen to Britannia: Re-imagining Medieval Europe in Video Game Music”
Kavita Mudan Finn (Independent Scholar), “‘Fandom quondam, fandom futurus’: A Fan Studies Approach to Arthuriana”
8. Nazis at the Round Table: Himmler’s Wewelsburg Castle
Sever Hall 203
Organizer and chair: Kathleen Kelly (Northeastern University)
Laurie Finke (Kenyon College), “Curating Difficult Knowledges”
Kathleen Kelly, “Himmler’s Enviro-Medievalism”
Martin Shichtman (Eastern Michigan University), “Niederhagen Concentration Camp: The Cruel Work of Medievalism”
Susan Aronstein (University of Wyoming), “Neo-Nazi Wewelsburg”
9. Poetry, Poetics, and Literary Effect
Emerson Hall 101
Chair: Sunil Sharma (Boston University)
Lu Kou (Columbia University), “The Poetics of Local Governance: Bureaucracy and Work in Medieval Chinese Poetry”
Pei-Chen Tsung (National Chengchi University), “Metaphorical Language in Qur’ānic Exegesis: A Comparative Study of Al-Rummānī and Al-Sharīf al-Radī”
Charles Archer (Pennsylvania State University, Abington), “The Problem of Mediation: Vision and Intermediaries in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde”
10. Manuscripts and Textual Communities
Sever Hall 202
Chair: Sarah Spence (University of Georgia)
Elena Shadrina (Harvard University), “Shredding the Commenda: Materiality of Documents and the Patterns of Mediterranean Trade”
John Young Brown Hood (Independent Scholar), “‘As I Lay Dying’: Reconstructing Thomas Aquinas’s Lost Commentary on Song of Songs”
Henry Ravenhall (University of California Berkeley), “Touch and the Subject of the Roman de la Rose”
Cynthia Turner Camp (University of Georgia), “Martial Piety, Occupier Identities among Henry V’s Knights: William Porter’s Book of Hours”
11. Methodological Approaches to Medieval Science
Sever Hall 308
Organizer and chair: Sophie Serra (Lund University)
Ana María Mora Márquez (Lund University), “What is ‘Science’ in Medieval Science?
Clelia V. Crialesi (SPHERE-CNRS, Paris), “Algebraic Practices: An Example of the Unitary Character of Medieval Science”
Sophie Serra, “How to Deal with the Notion of Error in Medieval Scientific Texts?”
12. Rulership and Representation in Eastern Christendom
Sever Hall 110
Chair: Alexander Riehle (Harvard University)
Sopio Gagoshidze (Rutgers University), “The Khakhuli Triptych and the Art of Repurposing”
Zoey Kambour (City University of New York), “The Word Enshrined: Depictions of Codices in Medieval Mosaic Programs”
Sviatoslav Dmitriev (Ball State University), “Byzantine Specula for Foreign Rulers”
Ian Storey (University of Notre Dame), “The Depiction and Function of Andronikos III Palaiologos in the Histories of Ioannes VI Kantakouzenos”
13. Medieval Law Decentered
Emerson Hall 108
Organizer: Ada Kuskowski (University of Pennsylvania)
Chair: Elizabeth Papp Kamali (Harvard Law School)
Ada Kuskowski, “Thinking about Law in Conquered Lands”
Thomas McSweeney (College of William and Mary), “‘The Free Man of One and the Villein of Another’: Discourses of Freedom in and out of the English Royal Courts”
Karl Shoemaker (University of Wisconsin), “The Jurisprudence of Mothers and Demons”
Jesus Velasco (Yale University), “Centripetal Glosses from Margins to Law”
14. Historiography and Methodology
Sever Hall 102
Chair: Philip Haberkern (Boston University)
Yuka Kadoi (University of Vienna) and Morris Rossabi (City University of New York), “The Historiography of the Mongol Empire: A Twentieth-Century Reflection on the Global Middle Ages”
Tristan Sharp (University of Chicago), “Plunder and Protection: Violence, Lordship, and the State in the Late Medieval Holy Roman Empire”
Elizabeth Griffith (Independent Scholar), “Medieval Slavery: The History of a History”
Ryan Low (University of North Dakota), “Jewish Identity, Medieval History, and Citizenship in Modern France”
15. Scholarship at the Crossroads: Transferring Knowledge in the Medieval Mediterranean
Sever Hall 106
Organizer: John Mulhall (Purdue University)
Chair and respondent: Thomas Burman (University of Notre Dame)
John Mulhall, “Gerard of Cremona and The New School of Toledo: Teaching Arabic Science in Latin in Twelfth-Century Toledo”
Manolis Ulbricht (University of Notre Dame), “The Qur’an in Byzantium”
Bruce McCuskey (University of Notre Dame), “Flavius Mithridates’s Scholastic Kabbalah: Philological Observations on the Translation of Ha-Nefesh Ha-Hokhmah in Vat. ebr. 191”
LUNCH BREAK & EVENTS, 1145-1330
L1. Incipit: A History of Manuscript Collecting at Harvard
A gallery talk with Sara Powell, Associate Curator of Early Books and Manuscripts, Houghton Museum.
12:00-1:15, Houghton Library Edson & Newman Room.
Space for this event is limited; please click here to register [Sign up TBA].
L2. Kenneth Conant: Envisioning Cluny
A study session with Reed Johnston Morgan, Ph.D. candidate in medieval history and archeology at Harvard University, focused on rarely-seen photos, paintings, and prints from the collections of the Harvard Art Museum pertaining to Kenneth Conant’s excavations and studies of Cluny Abbey from 1928 to 1950.
12:00-1:30, Harvard Art Museum Art Study Center (32 Quincy Street, third floor)
Space in this workshop is limited; please click here to register [Sign up link here]
L3. Money and Meaning in the Medieval World
A study session with Dr. Eurydice Georganteli, Lecturer on Medieval Art and Archeology at Harvard University, featuring medieval coins from the collections of the Harvard Art Museum.
12:15-1:30, Harvard Art Museum Art Study Center (32 Quincy Street, third floor)
Space in this workshop is limited; please click here to register [Sign up link here]
WELCOME AND OPENING PLENARY, 1300-1430
Sanders Theater, Memorial Hall
Welcoming remarks:
Sean Gilsdorf (Harvard University)
Program Committee Co-Chair
Lisa Fagin Davis
Executive Director of the Medieval Academy of America
Sara Lipton (Stony Brook University)
President of the Medieval Academy of America
Presentation of the Graduate Student Paper Prize
Presentation of the Inclusivity and Diversity Travel Grant
Plenary introduction:
Robin Fleming
Professor of History, Boston College;
President emerita of the Medieval Academy of America
Kristina Richardson
John L. Nau III Professor of the History and Principles of Democracy and Professor of History and Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures, University of Virginia
Breaking New Ground: East African People and Plants in the Early Islamic Middle East
CONCURRENT SESSIONS II (nos. 16-32), 1500-1645
16. The Middle Ages for Educators Open Access Resource (OAR) Challenge Final Four
Sponsored by the Medieval Academy of America’s K-12 Committee
Sever Hall 113
Organizer: Laura Morreale (Middle Ages for Educators, Princeton University)
Chair: Helmut Reimitz (Princeton University)
Judges: Skyler Anderson (The Waterford School), Sarah Cunningham (The Marymount School emerita), and Lindsay Pereira (John Abbott College)
And Finalists TBD
17. Defining and Challenging Genres
Sever Hall 102
Chair: Anita Obermeier (University of New Mexico)
Gabriel Torretta (Providence College), “Hearing the Master’s Voice: Transformations of Authority in Hrabanus Maurus and his Nachleben”
Miriamne Ara Krummel (University of Dayton), “Making and Revising Canons: The Voice of Otherness”
Elizabeth Watkins (Loyola University New Orleans), “Mixed Genres and Mixed Bodies: Romance and Hagiography, Reconsidered”
Riley McGuire (University of Notre Dame), “Prophecy as Poetry in Avicenna”
18. Illumination: Material Instability and Disidentification
Sever Hall 210
Organizer: Abby Kornfeld (City College of New York, CUNY)
Chair: Elizabeth Dospěl Williams (Museum of Fine Arts Boston)
Joseph Salvatore Ackley (Wesleyan University), “‘Precious Flotsam’: Varieties of Gold in Biblical Exegesis”
Shannon L. Wearing (Meadows Museum), “Material Translations in the Bible of Saint Louis and Cantigas de Santa María”
Abby Kornfeld, “The Intermedial Haggadah: Matzah, Eucharist, Metal, Vellum”
19. Argument and Authority in Medieval Philosophical Manuscripts: Some Limit Cases
Sever Hall 308
Organizer: Andrei Marinca (Universitatea Babeș-Bolyai, Cluj)
Chair: Ota Pavlíček (Institute of Philosophy, Czech Academy of Sciences)
Andrei Marinca, “Why Bring up the Bible in Talking about Atoms? John Gedo’s De continuo and Its Use of Non-Philosophical auctoritates”
Vlad-Lucian Ile (Universitatea Babeș-Bolyai, Cluj), “Aristotle in the Late Fourteenth-Century Debate on the Definition of Propositio: The Case of John Chilmark”
Ioana Curut (Universitatea Babeș-Bolyai, Cluj), “Maimonides as a Versatile Auctoritas in Viennese Sentences Commentaries”
20. Rulership and Violence in Medieval Iberia
Sever Hall 103
Chair: Maya Soifer Irish (Rice University)
Henry Gruber (University of North Carolina Chapel Hill), “Was There a Spanish Late Antiquity?”
Janna Bianchini (University of Maryland College Park), “The Lady Vanishes: Urraca Alfonso’s Forgotten Asturian Kingdom”
Russell Hopley (Independent Scholar), “Calling in the Cavalry: Ibn Sahl al-Andalusi and the Salvation of Islamic Seville”
Allison Bocchino (University of California Santa Barbara), “Reassessing the Anti-Jewish Riots of 1391 as a Point of Rupture in Spanish Jewish History”
21. Forms and Representations of Interpolation
Sever Hall 213
Organizers: Giulia Boitani (Cambridge University) and Johannes Junge Ruhland (University of Notre Dame)
Chair: Henry Ravenhall (University of California Berkeley)
Hannah Weaver (Columbia University), “Interpolated Images in a Late Witness of the Brut”
Giulia Boitani, “Grafting, Time, and Eve: The Tree of Life in Cologny, Fondation Martin Bodmer, Cod. Bodmer 147”
Johannes Junge Ruhland, “Tropes of Interpolation: Plants, Gems, Voice”
22. Norman Sicily and the Medieval Mediterranean
Sever Hall 106
Chair: Joshua Birk (Smith College)
Emmaleigh Huston (Florida State University), “Questioning Categories in the Medieval Mediterranean: Norman Sicily and the ‘Norman-Arab-Byzantine’”
Silvio Lorenzo Ruberto (Utrecht University/Leiden University), “Routes of Privilege in Early Norman Sicily: The Directions of Rulership in the Tyrrhenian Val Demone”
Kelsey Eldridge (University of Puget Sound), “A Stone for Bishops and Kings: Porphyry Ornament in the Cathedrals of Norman Salerno”
23. Sideways Reflections on the Senses and the Making of Desire in Medieval Vernacular Poetry
Sever Hall 206
Organizer: Cory Nguyen (University of California Berkeley)
Chair: Francesca Southerden (Oxford University)
Katherine McKee (Oxford University), “Fragrant Mediation in Duecento Italian Lyric Poetry”
Cory Nguyen, “Sonic Bodies and the Troubadour Tradition”
Charlie West (Yale University), “Petrarch and the Touch of Death”
24. Medieval Studies and/in the Institution
Sever Hall 203
Chair: Sean Gilsdorf (Harvard University)
Pamela Yee (University of Rochester), “Expanding Open Access in the Middle English Texts Series (METS)”
Anthony Smith (University of Florida), “Building Little Worlds: Interdisciplinary Approaches for Thinking Big about Medieval Society”
Diana Myers (Independent Scholar), “Corporate and Communal: Archive-Making at the MAA”
25. From Historia to Tarikh: Critical Comparisons and Approaches to Mediterranean Historiography
Sever Hall 110
Organizer and chair: Anthony Minnema (Samford University)
Abigail Balbale (New York University), “Echoes of Latin Historiography in Arabic Chronicles: The Case of al-Maqqarī (d. 1632)”
Hussein Fancy (Yale University), “Searching for Islamic Legal Practices in Latin Archives”
Alexandra Montero Peters (Texas State University), “Arabic Geographies and a Thirteenth-Century Castilian History of the World: Reading al-Bakrī’s Kitāb al-Masālik wa-l-Mamālik to Understand Alfonso X’s General estoria”
26. Texts and Bodies in Jewish Communities
Sever Hall 306
Chair: Jonathan Decter (Brandeis University)
Shoshana Freed Boardman (Independent Scholar), “Decoding the Babylonian Incantation Bowls”
Tovi Bibring (Bar-Ilan University), “Monstrous Intruders and Cultural Threats in Yaakov ben El’azar’s Thirteenth-Century Hebrew Tales”
Susan Einbinder (University of Connecticut), “Abraham Caslari: A Hebrew Tractate on the Black Death”
27. New Perspectives on Medieval Customary Law: Papers in Honor of Marie Kelleher (1970–2024)
Sever Hall 214
Organizers: Sarah Davis-Secord (University of New Mexico) and Thomas W. Barton (University of San Diego)
Chair: Elizabeth Hardman (Bronx Community College, CUNY)
Shahrouz Khalifian (Mount Saint Mary’s University), “The Frictions of a New Legal Order: Consuetudines, Roman Law, and Local Government in Montpellier, c. 1200–1350”
Thomas W. Barton, “Negotiating the Application of Customary Law in the Medieval Crown of Aragon”
Esther Liberman Cuenca (University of Houston Victoria), “The Customs of Skin: On Writing a History of Medieval Tattooing”
Respondent: Sara McDougall (John Jay College Graduate Center, CUNY)
28. Potentialities of Anthologising: Reconceptualising Poetic Manuscripts
Emerson Hall 101
Organizer: Máire Ní Mhaonaigh (University of Cambridge)
Chair: Orietta Da Rold (University of Cambridge)
Elizabeth Tyler (University of York), “Order: Exeter Book and Cambridge University Library, Gg5.35”
Sarah Bowden (King’s College London), “Constellation: Vorau, Stiftsbibliothek Cod. 276”
Máire Ní Mhaonaigh, “Trajectory: National Library of Ireland, G1200, The Book of Magauran”
29. Free Will, Individuality, and Privacy in Medieval Thought
Emerson Hall 104
Chair: Eileen Sweeney (Boston College)
Verena Epp (Phillipps-Universität Marburg), “Monk against His Will: Gottschalk of Orbais (c. 803-869) and Freedom in the Early Middle Ages”
Chelsea Parsons (Boston College), “Free Will and Community in the Piers Plowman ‘Search for Dowel’’”
Emma-Catherine Wilson (Oxford University), “The Politics of Privacy in the Oaths of Medieval Heralds and Malory’s Morte Darthur”
30. Medieval, Out of Time: The Permeable Boundaries of Periodization and Visions of Future Medieval Studies (Roundtable)
Emerson Hall 108
Organizer and chair: Matthew Gabriele (Virginia Tech)
Participants: Matthew Gabriele, Megan Cook (Colby College), Roland Betancourt (CASVA, National Gallery of Art), and Matthew Vernon (University of California Davis)
31. Medieval Manuscripts and Translations, in and out of Context
Sever Hall 202
Chair: William Stoneman (Houghton Library, Harvard University)
Riccardo Strobino (Tufts University), “A Newly-Discovered Anonymous Fourteenth-Century Commentary on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics”
Lori J. Walters (Florida State University), “Translating Christine de Pizan’s Queen’s Manuscript [QM] at the English Court”
Arooj Alam (Tufts University), “Recentering the Islamic Occult in the Islamic Tradition: Engaging with Ahmad al-Buni’s Shams al-Ma’arif and a Contemporary Urdu Translation”
Kathleen Tonry (University of Connecticut), “The Time-Reckoning Text: Medieval Time-Keeping in Manuscript, Print, and Digital Forms”
32. Form, Thought, and the Pleasure of Looking
Emerson Hall 305
Organizer and chair: Elina Gertsman (Case Western Reserve University)
Herbert L. Kessler (Johns Hopkins University), “Dancing with the Stars: From Scribal Hand to Planetary Motion (and Much In Between) in a Carolingian Pen Sketch”
Megan McNamee (University of Edinburgh), “Of Feathers, Fingernails, Pelts and Parchment: Transparency as Medium in the Lindisfarne Gospels”
Jeffrey F. Hamburger (Harvard University), “Bowling for Nicholas of Cusa”
Respondent: Vincent Debiais (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales)
OPENING RECEPTION, 1700-1900
Annenberg Hall, Memorial Hall (Campus Map)
EVENING EVENTS, 1900-2100
When Notre Dame Was New: Music and Liturgy in Paris c. 1200
St. Paul’s Church, 29 Mount Auburn Street
7:00-9:00 pm
Thomas Forest Kelly, Morton B. Knafel Research Professor of Musicology at Harvard University, explores the origins and flowering of polyphony in the liturgical life of the cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris around the year 1200. Accompanied by the Boys and Schola of Saint Paul’s Choir, directed by Brandon Straub.
Sponsored by the Harvard Catholic Forum, and open to all MAA 2025 participants.