Athabasca University and the University of Calgary are offering this Massive Open Online Course for graduate supervisors across the disciplines from 26 Oct. to 21 Dec. 2020. For more information, visit: https://taylorinstitute.ucalgary.ca/programs-and-courses/series-and-events/QGS

Casey Paradies, is now working on an MFA in Directing. He will be directing an original adaptation and translation of the York (and Wakefield) Mystery Plays—live online! Please join in the fun.

https://www.facebook.com/events/759762838086479/

A new podcast hosted by Kathy Cawsey, Associate Professor (English) at Dalhousie University and past President of the Canadian Society of Medievalists. Check it out at: https://shows.acast.com/eavesdroppingonarthurians/?fbclid=IwAR0PazW_tgPu1V9LK1zB0Z-RBNuoIWxrXqNCHbesNj63D13u2NZu5cMgOT4

Congratulations and welcome back to Canada to Dr. Professor Carolyn Muessig, who in July 2020 became Chair of Christian Thought in the Department of Classics and Religion at the University of Calgary. The Department's website says: "She specializes in Medieval Christianity, with particular emphasis on its devotional dimensions and the contribution of female teachers and preachers in Western Europe. Among her publications are The Faces of Women in the Sermons of Jacques de Vitry and The Stigmata in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. An award-winning teacher, she works with undergraduate and postgraduate students, and has supervised numerous PhD candidates and postdoctoral researchers. She is presently assessing the activities of medieval and early modern female preachers. Professor Muessig is committed to bringing together diverse communities from within and outside academe to explore the significance of Christianity in art, history and culture."

Rare Book School’s Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography (SoFCB) invites applications for its 2021–23 cohort of junior fellows. The deadline is Monday, 2 November 2020.

Continuing the work of the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship in Critical Bibliography (2012–17), this scholarly society works to advance the study of texts, images, and artifacts as material objects through capacious, interdisciplinary scholarship—and to enrich humanistic inquiry and education by identifying, mentoring, and training promising early-career scholars. Junior Fellows will be encouraged and supported in integrating the methods of critical bibliography into their teaching and research, fostering collegial conversations about historical and emerging media across disciplines and institutions, and sharing their knowledge with broader publics.

The fellowship includes tuition waivers for two Rare Book School courses, as well as funding for Junior Fellows to participate in the Society’s annual meeting and orientation. Additional funds are available for fellows to organize symposia at their home institutions, and fellows will have the option of attending a bibliographical field school to visit libraries, archives, and collections in a major metropolitan area. After completing two years in good standing as Junior Fellows, program participants will have the option to become Senior Fellows in the Society.

The Society is committed to supporting diversity and to advancing the scholarship of outstanding persons of every race, gender, sexual orientation, creed, and socioeconomic background, and to enhancing the diversity of the professions and academic disciplines it represents, including those of the professoriate, museums, libraries, archives, public humanities, and digital humanities. We warmly encourage prospective applicants from a wide range of disciplines, institutions, and areas of expertise.

For more information and to apply, please visit:
http://rarebookschool.org/admissions-awards/fellowships/sofcb/

For more information about diversity and the SoFCB, please visit the SoFCB Diversity & Outreach Committee’s Welcome Letter: https://rarebookschool.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/SoFCB_Welcome_Letter_2020.pdf

Inquiries about the SoFCB Junior Fellows Program can be directed to Sonia Hazard, SoFCB Selection Committee Chair, at shazard@fsu.edu, or Donna Sy, SoFCB Administrative Director, at rbs-mellon@virginia.edu.

We would be most grateful if you would pass along this call for applications to anyone you know who might be interested in applying, or to those who might advise early-career scholars with an interest in the study of material objects.

Please note that Rare Book School has many additional scholarship and fellowship opportunities now available:
•       Rare Book School Access 2021 Scholarship, Directors’ Scholarship, et al.
        https://rarebookschool.org/admissions-awards/scholarships/
•       The Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship for Diversity, Inclusion & Cultural Heritage
        https://rarebookschool.org/admissions-awards/fellowships/mellon-diversity/
•       The M. C. Lang Fellowship in Book History, Bibliography, and Humanities Teaching with Historical Sources
        https://rarebookschool.org/admissions-awards/fellowships/lang/
 

The Department of Historical and Cultural Studies at the University of Toronto Scarborough (UTSC) invites applications for a full-time tenure-stream position in the area of Late Antiquity and/or Early Islam. The appointment will be at the rank of Assistant Professor, with an expected start date of July 1, 2021, or shortly thereafter. The successful candidate will be joining a vibrant, multi-disciplinary scholarly community at UTSC and in the tri-campus University of Toronto with related regional, temporal, and thematic foci.Applications due by 30 Nov. 2020.

The Department of English and the Centre for Medieval Studies in the Faculty of Arts & Science at the University of Toronto invite applications for a joint full-time tenure stream position (75% English & 25% Centre for Medieval Studies) in the field of Later Medieval English Literature (1200-1500). The appointment will be at the rank of Associate Professor, with an expected start date of July 1, 2021. Applications due 11/30/2020.

Have you published a monograph, translation, or edition in 2020? If so, consider submitting it for the 2021 Margaret Wade Labarge Book Prize! Eligibility criteria for this year's prize have just been posted on the Labarge Prize page on this website, and submissions are due February 15 2021. Questions? Contact the Chair of the Prize Committee, Dr. James V. Maiello at James.Maiello@umanitoba.ca. 

Congratulations to Dr. Atri Hatef Naiemi, winner of the 2020 Leonard Boyle Dissertation Prize for "A Dialogue between Friends and Foes: Transcultural Interactions in Ilkhanid Capital Cities (1256-1335 AD)," completed at the University of Victoria under the direction of Professor Marcus Milwright.

The Prize Committee noted that in her innovative inter-disciplinary thesis, Dr. Hatef Naiemi works with different kinds of sources in a multitude of  languages, including Persian, Arabic and Chinese, and shows how a study of cities and urban development does not necessarily have to rely primarily on evidence drawn from archaeological reports. Dr. Hatef Naiemi consistently challenges the common perception that Mongol conquerors simply adopted the religious and visual culture of their Muslim subjects. Instead she argues that in the architectural design of the cities built by early conquerors, especially those Ghazan Khan founded, one can see clear negotiations between appeals to traditional Mongol culture and forms of
authority and Persian Muslim cultural influences. This intervention is
an important correction; the chapter on the Mongols in the recent
edition of the Oxford Handbook of Iranian History (2012) suggests that
the Mongol acculturation in the Ilkhanate was largely one-way. Dr. Hatef
Naiemi ends her thesis by suggesting the evidence of Mongol cities
demonstrates that the best way to understand the Mongol interaction with
Persian culture is not one of one-way acculturation but one of
transculturation. For its multidisciplinarity and its originality, the Canadian
Society of Medievalists’ Boyle Prize Committee is pleased to award "A
Dialogue between Friends and Foes: Transcultural Interactions in
Ilkhanid Capital Cities (1256-1335 AD)" the 2020 Boyle Prize.

Congratulations to David K. Coley, winner of the 2020 Labarge Prize for his book, Death and the Pearl Maiden: Plague, Poetry, England. Focused on the poems of MS Cotton Nero A.x., David's work explores discourses of plague in fourteenth-century English poetry.

More about this important and timely work can be found here.

David K. Coley is Associate Professor of English at Simon Fraser University.