Events

Ecocriticism & Premodern Studies
April 10th, 14th, and 17th, 2021
MARS @ Mizzou is pleased to host our bi-annual works-in-progress seminar, this time on “Ecocriticism & Premodern Studies.” The seminar will be held virtually in three sessions on April 10 (11am-12pm), 14 (12-1pm) , and 17 (11am-12pm). This year, we welcome Heide Estes, Pauline Goul, and Alan Mikhail to discuss their work on race in premodern studies.

Dates and speakers include:
- Heide Estes, Professor of English, Monmouth University - Sat, April 10 from 11am-noon
- Pauline Goul, Assistant Prof. of French, George Washington University, Weds, April 14 from noon-1pm
- Alan Mikhail, Professor of History, Yale University - Sat, April 17 from 11am-noon
For free registration, papers, & Zoom link, please email Prof. Megan Moore at mooremegan@missouri.edu.

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2019 Biannual MARS seminar on Race in Premodern Studies
April 13th, 2019, 11am-5pm in 215 Tate Hall
Mizzou MARS is pleased to announce our bi-annual works-in-progress seminar on “Race in the Premodern” on Saturday, April 13th from 11am-5pm in 215 Tate Hall. This year, we welcome Lynn Ramey, Cecile Fromont, and Cord Whitaker to discuss their work on race in premodern studies. The seminar is free and open to the public, and pre-registration is required by emailing Prof. Megan Moore at mooremegan@missouri.edu.

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2018 Mizzou Medieval & Renaissance Studies Annual Lecture - Prof. Peggy McCracken, University of Michigan - "Human Being and Animal Becoming: Actaeon and his Dogs”
October 2, 2018, 5:30pm in Switzler 001
In this talk, Prof. McCracken will focus on the translation of Ovid's Actaeon story in the fourteenth-century Ovide moralisé, where the translated story receives two interpretive readings: a euhemerist interpretation identifies the historical man who could have inspired the story and then the narrator explains the story as an allegory of Christian truth. She uses the Deleuzian notion of becoming-animal to explore this story about a man who loved dogs, and she shows that as the three narratives (translation, historical reading, allegorical interpretation) explain the value of human-animal relations, they also reveal the stakes of being and becoming for Christian identity and Christian salvation.

SAVE THE DATE! 2019 Biannual MARS seminar on Race in Premodern Studies
April 13th, 2019
Our very own biannual works-in-progress seminar will take place on Saturday, April 13th, 2019 and will focus on work engaging in conversations on race in the premodern. As always, we have three panelists whose pre-circulated works-in-progress will be the focus of our day-long discussion. Cord Whitaker (English, Wellesly), Lynn Ramey (French, Vanderbilt) and Cecile Fromont (U Chicago, Art History) have agreed to join us, and we hope to plan more events around the intersections of the premodern and race.

MARS-sponsored lecture by Ryan Perry (SLU)
April 19th, 2018
NCS postdoctoral scholar in residence at SLU, Ryan Perry will come to Mizzou on April 19th to give a talk entitled, “Chaucer, Quitter” at 4pm in Tate 102. He received his PhD from Berkeley in 2016, with a Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory. His dissertation was titled “Chaucer’s French Tradition: Coterie Poetics in Late-Medieval England." He has received a number of awards and grants, including a Medieval Academy of America GSC Grant for Innovation in Community Building and Professionalization, and a 2016 Digital Humanities at Berkeley Course Design Grant of $60,938 for “The Digital Middle Ages” (with Maura Nolan). He presented at the NCS Congress in London last July. Dr. Perry will be available to meet with graduate students while here.

Annual MARS lecture & scholarly residency — Cynthia Turner Camp (U Georgia)
March 4th-10th, 2018
The lecture will be Friday, March 9, at 4 p.m. in 110 Tate Hall. Title: "Praying Women's History in Medieval Nunneries: The Case of Barking Abbey." Followed by reception. There will also be a Medieval Reading Group meeting on one of Cynthia’s pieces, and she will give a Manuscript Workshop at Special Collections. For details on these events and more, see the email from Johanna Kramer (kramerji@missouri.edu).

The OE English Reading Group will be meeting on Fridays 2:15-3:15 in 112 Tate Hall

MARS session at the 52nd International Medieval Congress in Kalamazoo, MI
May 11th-14th, 2017
MARS will again be sponsoring a session at the International Medieval Congress in Kalamazoo, MI. The Panel title is “Aesthetics of Form.” The session is scheduled for Thursday, May 11, at 1:30 p.m. in Bernhard 209 (Session # 81).

The Presenters on the panel will be:
- Julie Orlemanski, University of Chicago
  "Aesthetics against Form, Reference against Form"
- Ian Cornelius, Loyola University Chicago
  "Aesthetics of Metrical Form: The Case of Middle English Lyric"
- Ingrid Nelson, Amherst College
  "Lyric Voices and the Politics of Aesthetics”

MARS Interdisciplinary Works-in-Progress Seminar on “The Aesthetics of Form”
April 22nd, 2017
Medieval and Renaissance Studies at the University of Missouri, Columbia proudly announces its Biennial Works-in-Progress Seminar. This year’s seminar is dedicated to the subject of “The Aesthetics of Form.”

The seminar will take place on Saturday, April 22, 2017, from 10:30 a.m.–4 p.m. with a reception following the event. All events will be held in 215 Tate Hall on the MU campus.

To register (free) and for further information, please contact Emma Lipton, Chair of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, at liptone@missouri.edu. This seminar is open to graduate students and faculty at MU and other nearby institutions. The deadline for registration is April 10, 2017.

We are very pleased to welcome three outstanding scholars to our campus. They will discuss the following papers:

Seeta Chaganti, English, University of California-Davis
“The Prosaics of Basse danse”
This paper examines an unusual early dance manual, featuring black pages and silver and gold ink, produced in Burgundy. It argues that the manuscript's instructional content collaborates with its visual features to offer a theory of prose form that responds to an emerging prose tradition in the literary culture of this period.

Sheila Blair, Art History, Boston College
“Depictions of Violence in Islamic Art 500-1500”
This paper focuses on the tomb known as the Gunbad-i ʿAli, constructed at Abarquh in central Iran in AH 448/1056-57 CE, as exemplary of the most creative in the history of medieval Iranian architecture when many materials, forms, and building types became standard, discussing the building’s materials (it is constructed of stone instead of the typical baked brick), its form (it is a rare example of a tall tomb tower built in southern Iran), its date (it is one of the earliest tombs to survive in Iran), and its patron and occupants.

Jonathan P. Lamb, English, University of Kansas
“William Shakespeare’s Mucedorus and the Market of Forms”
This paper will explore how the material, linguistic, and aesthetic forms surrounding the printed book became firmly installed in the early modern English cultural vocabulary. Bookish forms came to organize human experience, culminating in the period’s identification of the natural world itself with a printed book rather than a manuscript one. Combining book history, digitally-driven formalism, and intellectual genealogy, I contend that the properties of early modern printed books formulated aesthetic, cognitive, and descriptive modes still alive today.

Annual MARS Lecture
November 7th, 2016
Robin Fleming, Professor of History at Boston College, delivered our annual MARS lecture on Monday, November 7th, 2016, to a large audience in Strickland 104. After a pre-lecture reception, audience members enjoyed Professor Fleming’s stimulating talk, titled "Rethinking Early Medieval Migration with Women and Isotopes."

51st Annual International Congress on Medieval Studies
May 12th to 15th, 2016
Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Mizzou invites you to attend our sponsored session at the 51st annual International Congress on Medieval Studies.

"The Blackfriary Community Heritage and Archaeology Project – a new model for site preservation and community engagement in heritage."
Stephen Mandal, Director of the Irish Archaeology Field School and AIA George H. Forsyth, Jr. Memorial Lecturer
Thursday, January 28th, 2016 at 5:00pm
Lefevre 112
Stephen Mandal, Director of the Irish Archaeology Field School and AIA George H. Forsyth, Jr. Memorial Lecturer, will talk about the current excavations at a thirteenth-century Dominican friary in Ireland. His talk is entitled, "The Blackfriary Community Heritage and Archaeology Project – a new model for site preservation and community engagement in heritage." The lecture will take place on Thursday, January 28, in Lefevre 112. A reception will open the event at 5:00 pm with the lecture following at 5:30. The event is free and open to the public. We hope to see you there!

Announcing the 2015 Medieval and Renaissance Studies Annual Lecture - "Angry Words in God's Mirror: Psogos and Personal Attacks in Byzantium"
Prof. Dimitris Krallis, Simon Frasier University
Wed, November 11th, 2015 at 4-5:30pm
133 Mumford Hall
Dimitris Krallis teaches Byzantine political, intellectual, and broadly social history at Simon Fraser University. He has just finished a manuscript titled: An Empire of Quills: The Life and Deeds of a Byzantine Mandarin and will be working in the coming years on a History of the Late Byzantine era and on the idea of the betrayed hero in Byzantine and Modern Greek writing.

Rufus Monroe and Sofie Hougaard Paine Lecture in Religion
November 6th, 2015 at 3:30
Jesse Wrench Auditorium
Kathleen E. Kennedy, Associate Professor, Department of English, Penn State-Brandywine will be delivering a Rufus Monroe and Sofie Hougaard Paine Lecture in Religion: "The Puzzle of Abbot Islip's Book, Tudor Pop Music, & King Henry's Lady Chapel. Dr. Kennedy Dr. Kennedy is the author of three books and numerous articles, including an essay in Speculum last year, “Reintroducing the English Books of Hours, or ‘English Primers,’” Speculum 89 (2014): 693-723. Her book Medieval Hackers. New York: Punctum Books, 2015 is open access. She also writes about medieval England and contemporary culture for the Vice, the Mary Sue and other news outlets.

“The Limited Liminality of the Archangel in an Old English Homily in Praise of Saint Michael,”
22-24 October 2015
Little Rock, AR
Johanna Kramer (English) will be presenting “The Limited Liminality of the Archangel in an Old English Homily in Praise of Saint Michael,” 41st Annual Conference of the Southeastern Medieval Association.

“It’s Good to be the Queen: the Material Culture of Isabella of France,”
Thursday, October 1st, 2015
Dr. Anne Rudolff Stanton will deliver a plenary lecture at the Material Culture Conference hosted by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. This talk is an illustrated lecture about the illuminated prayer books and other moveable goods of Isabella of France, wife of Edward II.

Medieval and Renaissance Studies Reading Hour
Monday, September 28, at 4:00 pm
Tate Hall 101
Sponsored by MUGAMS

Medieval and Renaissance Studies Coffee Hour
Friday, September 25, 8:30-9:30 am
Hosted by the MU Graduate Association for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (MUGAMS)

Annual MARS Lecture: Dr. Lynn Ransom: "An Open Access Project Before the Internet Age: Ernest Cushing Richardson’s ‘Union World Catalogue of Manuscript Books’"
April 20, 2015, 5:00 pm
201 Switzler Hall
Dr. Lynn Ransom is the Project Manager for the Schoenberg Database of Manuscripts at the University of Pennsylvania, which supports scholarly work in locating information about the history and provenance of specific manuscripts. Now that it includes over 100,000 manuscript entries, the database is beginning to provide useful aggregate data about different types or groupings of manuscripts. Dr. Ransom will present a public lecture on the Schoenberg Database and its relationship to a similar project attempted in the 1920s by an American librarian and medievalist whose project and visions for democratic access to the world’s manuscripts paralleled contemporary open access projects. She also will hold a graduate seminar on moral and pedagogical schemata in medieval art, drawing from her scholarly work on the Verger de Soulas and other 13th- and 14th-century manuscripts.

MARS at Kalamazoo 2015
May 14-17, 2015
Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, MI
Please attend our two sessions on “Medieval Emotions: Affect and the Medieval Experience,” on Thursday May 14 at 10 am and at 1:30 pm.

2^nd Medieval and Renaissance Studies Seminar on the subject of “Emotion”
September 27, 2014
Our second seminar was again highly successful! The seminar provided a forum to think about current work and methodological questions in medieval and Renaissance studies by discussing works in progress that all dealt with the topic of emotion in medieval culture. Our three participants shared works in progress to be circulated before the seminar, which provided an exciting opportunity for dialogue between the participants and the faculty and students from MU and area medieval and Renaissance programs.

Our participants this year were: Richard Barton, History, University of North Carolina-Greensboro; Jessica Rosenfeld, English, Washington University; and Daisy Delogu, Romance Languages and Literatures, University of Chicago.

We plan to hold another seminar in the fall of 2016!

MARS sponsored a session entitled "Rethinking 'Medieval' for the Twenty-First Century” at the International Medieval Congress in Kalamazoo, MI
May 2014
- Sponsor: Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Univ. of Missouri–Columbia
- Organizer: Emma Lipton, Univ. of Missouri–Columbia
- Presider: Rabia Gregory, Univ. of Missouri–Columbia
- "Medieval/New," Patricia Clare Ingham, Indiana Univ.–Bloomington
- "What to Do with the 'Middle' in the Middle Ages,” Katie Little, Univ. of Colorado–Boulder
- "Vox Clamantis: The Voice of Medieval Authority in Shakespeare’s Pericles,” Kurt Schreyer, Univ. of Missouri–St. Louis

Annual MARS lecture by Jonathan Sawday, SLU: "Commit to these Waste Blanks': On Blank Space and Interpretation”
April 2, 2014
Dr. Jonathan Sawday holds the Walter J. Ong, SJ Endowed Chair in Humanities in the Department of English at St. Louis University. Dr. Sawday earned his Ph.D. in Renaissance Literature from University College, London, in 1988. Since then, he has authored two influential monographs: Engines of the Imagination: Renaissance Culture and the Rise of the Machine (Routledge, 2007) and The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (Routledge, 1995). He has edited or co-edited three more books and has published more than thirty articles in peer-reviewed journals and collections. Dr. Sawday is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, a Fellow of the English Association, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts. He has been awarded grants by the Fulbright Association, the British Academy, the British Council, and the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, as well as the Huntington Library (San Marino, CA), the Newberry Library (Chicago, IL) and the Institute for the Advanced Study for the Humanities in Moscow (Russia). Dr. Sawday’s work on topics as diverse as sixteenth-century French funerary sculpture, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century British literature, contemporary body art, and cyborgs and transhumanism is truly interdisciplinary, examining the intersections between science, technology, and literature.

Mid America Medieval Association (MAMA) 38 "The Global Middle Ages" == The University of Missouri and Columbia College, Columbia, Missouri
February 22, 2014
Plenary Address: Sahar Amer, Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies, University of Sydney, ”Reading Medieval French Literature from a Global Perspective"

The conference focused on the study of the medieval period in a global context. The rise of world history in the Academy, as well as the increasingly interconnected world in which we live in the 21st century, has not left medievalists unaffected. Papers touched on the following topics: the transferability of the concept of a "middle age" to non-European societies and economies; post-colonial and/or comparative studies focusing on exchanges between Europe, Asia, and Africa; book arts, preservation, calligraphy, paleography and codicology of non-western manuscripts; travel accounts, maps, and other evidence of historical or imaginative cultural exchange; global trade and representations of luxury goods such as ivory, spices, silks, ceramics, and jewels; the influence of global cultures on European science, medicine, fashion, food, and art; medieval European perceptions of African and Asian peoples and civilization; pedagogical approaches to teaching the Middle Ages as part of World History/Literature/Religion Programs.

The Medieval and Renaissance Studies Program seminar on the subject of “Memory.”
November 9, 2013
The purpose of the seminar was to provide a forum to think about current work and methodological questions in Medieval and Renaissance studies. We invited three participants from different disciplines and time periods to send us a work in progress (about 20 pages). We circulated the papers before the seminar and then spent an hour discussing each paper with its author. The following scholars discussed their works-in-progress:
- Professor Ruth Evans (Professor of English) "Troilus and Criseyde: Sexual Difference and the Knots of Memory."
- Laura Gelfand (Professor of History of Art, Utah State) "Representations of Sacred Space and Devotional Memory Practices"
- Jonathan Baldo, (Professor of English, University of Rochester) "Stages of Forgetfulness in Shakespeare's Second Tetralogy"

Annual MARS lecture by Professor Virginia Blanton, UMKC, "Detectives in the Archives: Narrating the Backstory of a Medieval Manuscript"
November 2, 2012