This day-long symposium will commemorate Elizabeth (Peggy) A. R. Brown’s extraordinary legacy in the field of Medieval Studies and will mark the official launch of the Elizabeth A. R. Brown Medieval Historians’ archive. For more details and the event program, click here.
Co-organized by Nicholas Herman (Kislak/SIMS) and Ada Kuskowski (Department of History).
Uri Shachar teaches in the Department of History at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, where he is also a member in the Center for the Study of Conversion and Inter-Religious Encounters. The current year he is spending at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton working toward his second monograph, provisionally entitled The Fountain of All Knowledge: A Mediterranean Epistemology of Vernacular French.
Michelle M. Hamilton is Director of Premodern Studies and Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities where she offers courses on religious studies, Jewish studies, and Spanish literature and culture. She is also the Editor of La corónica: A journal of Medieval Hispanic Languages, Literatures, and Cultures. She has published widely on multi-confessional Iberia. Publications include: Islam and the Arabs in Spanish Scholarship (16th Century to the Present) (Harvard 2021); The Study of al-Andalus: The Scholarship and Legacy of James T. Monroe (Harvard 2018); Beyond Faith: Belief, Morality and Memory in a Fifteenth-Century Judeo-Iberian Manuscript (Brill 2014) and In and Of the Mediterranean: Medieval and Early Modern Iberian Studies (Vanderbilt 2014).
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Núria Silleras-Fernández is a Professor at the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Colorado-Boulder and affiliated faculty in the Humanities Program. Her research focuses on cultural and intellectual history, gender, and literature in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia, Europe, and the Mediterranean. She is the author of three scholarly monographs, Power, Piety, and Patronage in Late Medieval Queenship: Maria de Luna (Palgrave: 2008 and in Spanish CSIC: 2012); Chariots of Ladies: Francesc Eiximenis and the Court Culture of Medieval and Early Modern Iberia (Cornell UP: 2015), and The Politics of Emotion: Love, Grief, and Madness in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia (Cornell UP: 2024). She is currently working on two book projects; one relates to gender, marriage, sexuality, and emotions, and the other one to cultural capitals, exchange, polyglossia, patronage, translation, and gender.
Ariel Fein studies the medieval visual cultures of Byzantium and the Islamic world. Her research focuses on intercultural artistic connections across the frontier zones of the medieval Mediterranean, with a particular interest in the arts of Norman Sicily and the Arab-Christian communities of medieval Egypt and Ifriqiya.
David Wacks is Professor of Spanish in the School of Global Studies and Languages’ Department of Romance Languages at the University of Oregon. He earned his PhD in Hispanic Languages and Literatures from UC Berkeley in 2003. In 2006 he was Harry Starr Fellow in Judaica at the Harvard Center for Jewish Studies. He is author of Framing Iberia: Frametales and Maqamat in Medieval Spain, (Brill, 2007), winner of the 2009 La corónica award, Double Diaspora in Sephardic Literature: Jewish Cultural Production before and after 1492 (Indiana University Press, 2015), winner of the 2015 National Jewish Book Award in the category of Sephardic Culture, and Medieval Iberian Crusade Fiction and the Mediterranean World (University of Toronto Press, 2019). His current book project, People of the Book: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Retellings of the Hebrew Bible in Medieval Iberia, is under review at Oxford University Press. He blogs on his current research at http://davidwacks.uoregon.edu.
Sébastien Garnier was educated at INALCO and EHESS (Paris), with additional trainings taken in foreign institutions. Agrégé in Arabic (2008) and Ph.D. in History (2019), he published in 2022 his Histoires hafsides by Brill. Specialized in the study of medieval Western Islam, he is a co-founding member of LibMed, an academic community actively working on premodern Libya. His research has shifted to “memories as local competitors”. Besides, he is supervising the forthcoming catalogue of the manuscripts kept at the National Library of Libya. Since 2023, he has become editor-in-chief for Journal of Islamic Manuscripts, a position he now shares with Prof. Arianna d’Ottone.
Susan McDonough, this year the George William Cotrell Jr member of the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, is an Associate Professor of history at UMBC. A scholar of women, gender and sexuality in the medieval Mediterranean, Susan is currently at work on two projects: one is solo-authored monograph on sex workers, the other, a collaboration with Michelle Armstrong-Partida of Emory University, began with Mediterranean singlewomen and has grown to include single men, migration, shared cultures of sexuality, and gender identity. Her work has been supported by fellowships with the NEH and the Newberry Library.
Check this page for announcements of local events and opportunities for medievalists in the Delaware Valley!
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Send event announcements to dvma@dvmamedieval.com to share your event with local medievalists.
The Delaware Valley Medieval Association (DVMA) is made up of medievalists from New Jersey, eastern Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland, and meets four times during the academic year. The purpose of the meetings, and the association in general, is to share members’ current research and to make connections and forge relationships that support, sustain, and advocate for all aspects of medieval studies in the Delaware Valley region. Begun in 1979 as part of the Lilly-Pennsylvania Program, the DVMA was officially formed in 1983. The DVMA has served this community of outstanding medievalists for over thirty years.
The DVMA is affiliated with the Medieval Academy of America through its Standing Committee on Centers and Regional Associations (CARA).
This three-day intensive in-person course will focus on reading medieval primary sources for the social, economic and religious history of Egypt and Greater Syria, including Palestine during the period of the Crusades, roughly 1050-1500. It is intended for advanced graduate students and other qualified participants and will be offered by Prof. Paul M. Cobb (University of Pennsylvania) in collaboration with Prof. Ann Zimo (University of New Hampshire) and Prof. Reuven Amitai (Hebrew University of Jerusalem). The course will include close reading and historical analysis of published Arabic literary sources (chronicles and the like), Frankish sources in translation, and modern secondary literature. The overall goal is to provide students with in-depth understanding of the conventions and genres of historical writing on the Crusades and what we gain (and lose) by understanding the Crusades in their Middle Eastern context.
The number of participants will be limited to a maximum of 12.
Applications for the intensive course should include a CV, a statement of purpose (up to 750 words), and a letter of recommendation by someone familiar with your work. These should be sent to sms2026philadelphia@gmail.com by March 6, 2026. Those who are selected for the course will be notified before the end of March 2026, at which time a syllabus and information about the method of payment for the course fees will be provided.
The course fee is $250, which also includes the registration fee for the subsequent conference (July 23-25), about which more information can be found here: https://mamluk.uchicago.edu/sms-conference.html
All fees must be paid by April 15, 2026. Registration and participation will not be confirmed until payment is received. Participants must make their own travel arrangements; the local organizer will provide suggestions for accommodation.
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Friday, February 6, 2026, 4:30–6:00 PM EST
Hybrid: In-person at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Room Arch 104
Temple University, 2001 N. 13th Street, Philadelphia PA 19122
and virtual via Zoom (register here: https://temple.zoom.us/meeting/register/YEJDqOhrSdGUT4v7hktfUQ)
A reception will follow the lecture in person at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Temple University.
This lecture explores aspects of the history and art of Eastern Europe, which developed at the intersection of competing traditions and worldviews for much of the Middle Ages. Byzantium played a key role in shaping local artistic developments in regions of the Balkan Peninsula, the Carpathian Mountains, and further north, as did contacts with Western and Central Europe. Key objects and monuments reflect aspects of local negotiations among competing traditions, and the shifting meanings and functions of cultural heritage during moments of change, crisis, and conflict. Examples from regions of modern Ukraine, Romania, and North Macedonia, among others, underscore the importance of putting Eastern Europe in focus temporally, geographically, methodologically, and theoretically within the study of medieval, Byzantine, post-Byzantine, and early modern art history.
Alice Isabella Sullivan, PhD, is Assistant Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at Tufts University. She specializes in the artistic production of Eastern Europe and the Byzantine-Slavic cultural spheres in the period between the 14th and 16th centuries. Sullivan is the author of the award-winning book The Eclectic Visual Culture of Medieval Moldavia (2023), Europe’s Eastern Christian Frontier (2024), and co-editor of several volumes. In addition, she is co-director of the Sinai Digital Archive, and co-founder of North of Byzantium and Mapping Eastern Europe— two initiatives that explore the history, art, and culture of the northern frontiers of the Byzantine Empire in Eastern Europe during the medieval and early modern periods.
The event is free and open to the public. The Jackson Lecture in Byzantine Art is generously sponsored by Lynn Jackson, with additional support from Temple University’s General Activities Fund (GAF).
The topic of this virtual symposium, Medieval Mediterranean Ways, is conceptualized very broadly geographically as well as intellectually, and it seeks to examine both meanings of the word “ways”, as direction and as manner. Our articulation alludes to both Mediterranean ways as routes or directions as well as ways as manners, customs and cultural practices. Thus, this symposium aims at engaging in an intellectual dialogue that widely encompasses areas of inquiry as varied as trade, cartography, visual cultures and intercultural and interreligious relationships across the Mediterranean during the medieval period.
MEDIEVAL MEDITERRANEAN WAYS SYMPOSIUM PROGRAM
MORNING SESSION. 10:00 am-12:00 pm
12:00 pm-1:00 pm (EST) Lunch Break
AFTERNOON SESSION. 1:00 pm-3:00 pm
| Registration Link | https://temple.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_JzgTXT6OSGuhx8Lw9pCwXw#/registration |
| Venue | Zoom Webinar |
| Starts | Fri Apr 11 2025, 10:00 AM EDT |
| Ends | Fri Apr 11 2025, 3:00 PM EDT |
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