Lecture series
Medieval Studies Lecture Series
The Digital Middle Ages
September 23, 2-4: Tracy Chapman Hamilton, PhD (Sweet Briar College) and Mariah Proctor-Tiffany, PhD (California State University, Long Beach), "Mapping Women in Late Medieval Paris & Using Digital Mapping in Your Research"
January 27, 5-6 pm ZOOM ONLY: Abigail P. Dowling (Mercer University), "Integrating Transkribus and other digital tools into archival history."
February 24, 4-5 pm ZOOM only: Delfi I. Nieto-Isabel (Queen Mary University of London), "Putting Women in the Map: Digital Cataloging and Historical Network Analysis of Dissident Beguines in the Western Mediterranean"
March 24: Helen Davies (University of Colorado), "Remembering the Forgotten Past: Multispectral Imaging and Recovery of Damaged Texts"
April 7: Ian Cornelius (Loyola University Chicago), "Adventures in Bibliography: Keeping the Records on Poetry in English 1200-1525"
Past Lecture Series:
Class, Caste and Race in the Global Middle Ages:
Negotiating privilege and exclusion in medieval societies
“The Middle Ages” was not a mythical place, populated with an isolated and homogeneous society. Medieval Europe maintained important connections with the peoples of Africa and Asia, and itself comprised perennially shifting mixtures of cultural affinities, languages, religious identities and ancestral origins, due to migration, trade, conquest and traffic in humans. Throughout the medieval millenium, communities found various ways to construct social hierarchies to create both privilege and exclusion. By looking broadly at “class, caste and race”, the speakers in our lecture series will offer us ways to talk and think about the varied and complex ways medieval societies organized themselves to the benefit of some and the detriment of others.
(Topics of lectures are still tentative, subject to change)
Fall 2023
Christopher Fletcher and Yasmine Hachimi,
(Newberry Library) Sept 25
[“Learning to See Race before Race: Medieval Witnesses at the Newberry Library”]
Lauren Beck (Mount Allison Univ, Sackville Canada) Nov 6
[“Orientalizing the Medieval Spanish Epic through Book Illustration: Race, Gender, and the Cid”]
Spring 2024
Kathy Lavezzo (University of Iowa) February 19
["Bad Medievalism, or how we feel about the Middle Ages."]
Sarah Davis-Secord (Univ New Mexico) March 18
[“Muslims and the Making of Medieval Sicily”]
Sierra Lomuto (Rowan Univ) March 25
[“Of Fremde land: Mongol Exoticism and English Rhetoric in ‘The Squire’s Tale’”]
Elissa Weaver (Emeritus, University of Chicago) April 15
[“Seeing Through Clothes: the social, economic, and symbolic value of clothing in Boccaccio’s Decameron”]
