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98th Annual Meeting of the Medieval Academy of America takes place this week

Washington, D.C. is hosting hundreds of medieval studies scholars this week, as the Medieval Academy of America runs their 98th Annual Meeting. It marks the first major medieval studies conference of the year.

While previous meetings were held online or in a hybrid format because of the pandemic, this year’s conference is being held in-person, with most events taking place at The Grand Hyatt hotel. The Annual Meeting begins on February 23rd with Suzanne Conklin Akbari of the Institute for Advanced Study delivering the Opening Plenary lecture on “Language, Sovereignty, and Nation: ‘Medieval’ Vernaculars on Native Lands.”

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Other plenary talks are being given by Verena Krebs of Ruhr-Universität Bochum on “Becoming Solomon’s Heirs: Kingship, Power and the Refashioning of Antiquity in Late Medieval Ethiopia,” Maureen C. Miller of the University of California, Berkeley on “Reframing the ‘Documentary Revolution’ in Medieval Italy (Or, How My Students Revolutionized My Research),” and Anne Dunlop of the University of Melbourne on “Owls and Trumpets: Italian Art and Mongol Asia, c. 1300.”

Overall, more than 160 papers and roundtables are being held on a variety of topics. Sessions range from ‘Medieval Luxury Consumption and the Global Economy’ to ‘Consent to Sex in Law and Legal Practice in the Middle Ages.’ Many of the leading scholars in the field attend the meeting, which runs from February 23rd to the 26th. Pre-conference events begin on the 21st. For full details, please visit the conference website.

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The Annual Meeting of the Medieval Academy of America is considered one of the three largest conferences in the field, with the other two being the International Congress on Medieval Studies, held at Western Michigan University, and the International Medieval Congress at the University of Leeds. The schedules for both of those events have recently been posted online – click here her the ICMS program and here for the IMC program.

Top Image: Photo by Carol M. Highsmith / Library of Congress

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