The 2024 Winter Meeting of the Delaware Valley Medieval Association takes place on February 2, 1pm-6pm at the University of Pennsylvania’s Van Pelt Library, Class of 1978 Pavilion (6th floor). The theme is “Between Cultures.” Registration is $10 for DVMA members, $15 for non-members. Graduate students attend free of charge (use coupon DVMA24GS). 

Program

Welcome, 1:00-1:05 
Ada Kuskowski (Penn)

Plenary, 1:05-2:00pm  

Anne Lester (Johns Hopkins) & Laura Morreale (Independent Scholar), “Life and Death in Crusader Acre: Collaborations across the Account-Inventory of Eudes of Nevers (1266)”  

Panel 1, 2:00-3:25pm 
Moderator:  Helmut Reimitz (Princeton)

Caz Batten (Penn) “Constructing the Feather Cloak: Disability, Masculinity, and the Prosthetics of Weland the Smith”  

Elizabeth Urban (WCUPA) – “Unfree Women in Early Islamic Historical Narratives: A Genre Analysis”  

Hartley Lachter (Lehigh), “Supernal Archons of the Nations: Christianity and Islam in Medieval Kabbalistic Theosophy”   

Panel 2, 3:35-5pm  
Moderator:  Elly Truitt (Penn)

Sarah Davis-Secord (IAS/UNM), “Muslim-Christian Encounters in the Italo-Greek Saints Lives” 

Alicia Walker (Bryn Mawr), “Ethical Formation and the Byzantine Viewer: Navigating between the Classical and the Christian”   

Samantha Kelly (Rutgers), “Negotiating Religious Diversity: Ethiopian Orthodox in Renaissance Rome”  

Reception, 5-6pm 

The Fall Meeting of the Delaware Valley Medieval Association takes place on Wednesday, December 6, 2023; 3:15pm-5:00pm. This virtual speaker session features Isabella Weiss, Albert Kohn, and Reyhan Durmaz, the 2023 DVMA Prizes and Awards recipients. The meeting is co-sponsored by CHAT Premodern Research Forum at Temple University. A business meeting of the DVMA will be scheduled separately.

• Isabella Weiss (Rutgers University, Art History): “‘Portable Meadows’: Verdure Textiles and Living Turf in Fifteenth-Century Franco-Flemish Court Culture.” DVMA Travel Grant
  
• Albert Kohn (Princeton University, History): “The Reception of Gamaliel in the Medieval Latin West (1000-1350).” DVMA Paper Prize 
  
• Reyhan Durmaz (University of Pennsylvania, Religious Studies): “Visualizing Countryside,” a photograph archive of Orthodox Syriac churches and monasteries in south-east Turkey. DVMA Digital Project Prize

The Fall Meeting of the Delaware Valley Medieval Association takes place on Wednesday, December 6, 2023; 3:15pm-5:00pm. This virtual speaker session features the 2023 DVMA Prizes and Awards recipients and is co-sponsored by CHAT Premodern Research Forum at Temple University. A business meeting of the DVMA will be scheduled separately.

Program

3:15pm – Participants arrive (Zoom meeting opens)

3:25pm – Opening remarks (Montserrat Piera, Temple University, DVMA President)

3:30 – 5:00pm – Speaker Session followed by Q & A

• Isabella Weiss (Rutgers University, Art History): “‘Portable Meadows’: Verdure Textiles and Living Turf in Fifteenth-Century Franco-Flemish Court Culture.” DVMA Travel Grant
  
• Albert Kohn (Princeton University, History): “The Reception of Gamaliel in the Medieval Latin West (1000-1350).” DVMA Paper Prize 
  
• Reyhan Durmaz (University of Pennsylvania, Religious Studies): “Visualizing Countryside,” a photograph archive of Orthodox Syriac churches and monasteries in south-east Turkey. DVMA Digital Project Prize

We hope you will join us to learn more about the exciting scholarship taking place in our area with the support and recognition of the DVMA.

Event Properties

We are no longer accepting registration for this event

DVMA Spring Meeting
April 29, 2023 
1:00pm -5:30pm
Rubenstein Commons, Institute for Advanced Study
Princeton, New Jersey

Please join us for the Delaware Valley Medieval Association’s Spring Meeting hosted by the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. This is an in-person event held in the Rubenstein Commons and features three engaging speakers on topics of special interest to medievalists. A reception follows.

Program
1:00-1:15 Introduction

1:15-2:15 Matilda Bruckner, Boston College
“Playing with the Letter in Judges 19: Hospitality Gone Awry in the Bible moralisée“

2:15-3:15 Derek Krueger, University of North Carolina at Greensboro and School of Historical Studies
“Is There an Icon in this Text?: Niketas Stethatos’s Life of Symeon the New Theologian and a Byzantine Theology of the Saints”

3:15-3:30 Break

3:30-4:30 Sarah Guérin, University of Pennsylvania
“Unveiling the Sacred: On Ivory, the Covenant, and the Talmud”

4:30-5:30 Reception

Registration is $10 for DVMA members, $15 for guests. Graduate students should register but attend at no cost (use code DVMA23GS at registration checkout). Payment can be made during web-registration or at the door.

This event is co-organized by Suzanne Akbari and Montserrat Piera and is sponsored by the DVMA, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, and CHAT PreModern Research Forum at Temple University. 

Event Properties

Date: February 18, 2023, 1-5 pm

Location: Temple University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
The Delaware Valley Medieval Association (DVMA) invites 250-word abstracts for 20-minute talks or 5-minute flash presentations by graduate students in any discipline and on any topic that pertains to medieval studies. Global medieval submissions are welcome and encouraged.

The purpose of this event is to provide graduate students with an opportunity to connect with an interdisciplinary community of graduate students and professors who specialize in the Middle Ages from other universities in the region, to gain experience presenting in a conference setting, and to receive feedback on their work in a casual environment. Hence, this call for papers is intentionally open-ended: the work you present at this event could include a developing chapter in your dissertation, a completed seminar paper, a work in progress, or simply a new line of inquiry that you would like to pursue.

To submit a proposal or request more information please contact Brooke.Adamski@temple.edu 

Deadline for submissions: December 1, 2022

How did they learn? How did they teach?: Exploring Knowledge Transmission from Late Antiquity to the Early Modern

Saturday, Dec. 3, 2022; 9am-6pm, Princeton University
Louis A. Simpson International Building, Room A71

Much of our modern knowledge is the result of centuries of experiments driven by human desire to record and pass down successes, failures and lessons learned. The timespan from the periods often called “Late Antique” to that called “Early Modern” offers enormous scope to explore the historical record of knowledge transmission across diverse social contexts. While scholars in Baghdad, such as Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq (9th c.), translated ancient medical texts, Theophilus (12th c.) distilled complex information to record proprietary painting techniques in his De diversis artibus. Just as Renaissance humanists classicized their curricula, Enlightenment thinkers sought to secularize scientific methods. In each case, knowledge was consistently safeguarded, amended, and transmitted. This conference will explore the many networks and forms of knowledge transmission active across the Late Antique and Early Modern periods. We will work within a wide span of geographical and chronological parameters as well as across disciplines.

The topic of education and knowledge transmission is timely. As the last two years have emphasized, learning and teaching methods can take on a variety of shapes and can change drastically in order to adapt to the rising needs of both students and educators. Pedagogical developments, though exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic today, have been inherent to the human experience throughout history and across the globe. However, the very concept of education and the interpersonal relationships knowledge and its transmission entails have greatly varied over time, and their historical models offer compelling challenges to our modern understanding of when, where and how learning takes place, who is a teacher, and who is a student. The conference invites graduate students to re-examine their own assumptions about education in the medieval and early modern eras and approach their material in a new light.

For full session details and to register please visit: https://medcremsconference.princeton.edu/schedule

9 AM Introductory remarks 

9:15 AM Panel I: Modes of transfer
Sarah Cohen (Columbia), Sofia Hernandez (Princeton), Fay Slakey (Princeton)

11:15AM Panel II: Language
Daniel Berardino (Fordham), Faiza Masood (Princeton), Yaacov Bronstein (Rutgers)

12:45PM Lunch + poster session
Princeton undergraduates present posters of their research

2:30PM Panel III: Pedagogical praxis
Anna Speyart (Princeton), Brooke Franks (Stony Brook), Jennifer Ruth Hoyden (Teachers College, Columbia)

4:30PM Keynote by Paula Findlen
“Francesco Carletti’s Vision of Nature”
Followed by reception

Made possible thanks to the support of these Princeton sponsors:

The Medieval Studies Program and the Center for Renaissance and Early Modern Studies, the Department of Art & Archaeology, the Center for Collaborative History, the Program in History of Science, the Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies, and the Graduate School. With additional support from the Delaware Valley Medieval Association.