All Awards & Milestones

Mona Burkett from the Department of History recently passed her MA exams. Chris Flack in English passed his PhD preliminary exams. Congratulations to you both!

Department of French and Italian Professor Susan Noakes has been named the first holder of the University of Minnesota Arts and Humanities Chair. This two-year award provides Susan with a research fund which she plans to use for the SCGMA (Scholarly Community for the Globalization of the “Middle Ages”) project.

For more information on the project, please see: the CMS website or SCGMA's site.

Many of our Center for Medieval Studies minors have received fellowships, been awarded travel grants, passed preliminary examinations, or defended their dissertations in recent weeks. Congratulations to all of you!

--History graduate student Philip Grace has received a Graduate School Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship to complete his dissertation on fatherhood in late medieval Basel.
--History graduate student Tovah Bender successfully defended her dissertation, “Negotiating Marriage: Artisan Women in Fifteenth-Century Florentine Society.”
--History graduate students Gabriel Hill and Kevin Mummey passed their preliminary examinations.
--English Department graduate student Elissa Hansen was awarded CMS funding for travel to Waukesha, WI to study contemporary reading practices in the Order of Julian of Norwich.
--History graduate student Kevin Mummey was awarded funds to travel to Mallorca for archival work on his dissertation on women slaveholders in 14th century Mallorca.
--History grad student Tiffany Vann Sprecher received a grant for travel to Cambridge, MA to work with a manuscript of Jacques de Vitry’s sermons.
--French and Italian graduate student Rachel Gibson was awarded funds from CMS to travel to Rome this summer in order to pursue an advanced course in Italian.
--CMS has also awarded travel funding from the Carl Shepard Memorial Fund to Ashley Deering, an undergraduate at U of M Morris, to travel to the International Medieval Congress at Leeds to present her research on “Saving Faith in Languedoc: the Dominican Practice of Medieval ‘Doctors of Souls’.” She worked on this project as a UROP with Professor Stephen Martin.

History graduate student David Crane will be studying Arabic at UCLA this summer, with the support of a FLAS grant.

Congratulations, David!

Basit Qureshi has received a Critical Language Scholarship (CLS) from the US Department of State. The scholarship fully funds a number of individuals to travel overseas during the summer in order to study what have been deemed critical need languages. From June 11th to August 9th, he will be studying intensive Arabic at the American Research Center in Egypt (ARCE), which is located in Cairo.

Ann Zimo, graduate student in the Department of History has received both a summer-term and year-long FLAS fellowship to study Arabic.

She plans to do her summer study in Chicago before returning to us in the Fall. Congratulations, Ann!

History Professor and CMS Director Ruth Karras was recently made a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America.

MAA Fellows are scholars who have made notable contributions to the Academy's goals to "support research, publication and teaching in medieval art, archaeology, history, law, literature, music, philosophy, religion, science, social and economic institutions and all other aspects of the Middle Ages." There are only a maximum of 125 Fellows at any given time.

More kudos are in order for History Department graduate students Gabriel Hill and Tiffany vann Sprecher.

They've each been awarded a Graduate Research Partnership Program (GRPP) grant. This CLA program encourages graduate students to partner with a faculty advisor on projects of shared interest. It provides Fellows with a summer stipend.

Please join us in congratulating Don Swanbeck, from English and Rachel Gibson, from French and Italian on their reciept of FLAS Fellowships.

The FLAS supports a graduate language studies, with preference given to students who would like to study less-commonly taught languages and advanced work in more common languages.

Don applied to study Arabic, and won both the summer FLAS (to study a specific language only) and the school-year version (which comes with a full tuition waiver and stipend for the year). He hopes to apply the skills he learns to working with medieval Arabic romances.

Rachel won the summer FLAS, for advanced study in Italian and will be headed all the way to Rome to do so.

The Center is pleased to welcome Professors Stephen Martin (French--Morris) and Steve Matthews (History--Duluth) to the Medieval Studies Graduate Faculty.

Professor Martin joined the faculty at Morris in 2007, becoming Assistant Professor in 2008, when he also received his PhD from the University of Virginia. He is at work on a digital edition of “Aucassin et Nicolete.” His areas of specialization are Old French, Paleography, Codicology, Editorial Theory, and Early Medieval Literature.

Professor Matthews is Assistant Professor of History at Duluth and was just named a McKnight-Land Grant Professor for 2009-2011. His book Theology and Science in the Thought of Francis Bacon was published by Ashgate in 2008. A number of his courses, including on the history of Christianity and the history of Science, cover the Middle Ages.

Last year, Professor Anatoly Lieberman from the department of German, Scandinavian, and Dutch created a website for the study of Old Norse with the help of graduate student Paul Peterson and gracious support from the UMN Language Center. That site is now available to those who are enrolled in the Old Norse course through the WebCT system.

This year he received another grant from the Center ($2,500) for the production a Middle High German website, which will be ready by mid-May. Congratulations to Professor Lieberman, and what great news for his students.

Kay Reyerson, professor of History specializing in Medieval Europe, Mediterranean Europe, Medieval France, Social and economic history, Legal history, and World History, has been elected a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America, a wonderful testament to her accomplishments. The Medieval Academy was founded in 1925 and is the largest and most prestigious association committed to the study of the medieval world.

Tom Gallanis, Professor of Law and a member of the Core Faculty in Medieval Studies, has been named Associate Dean for Research and Faculty Development at the Law School starting January 1. He will have a two year appointment there.

We would like to congratulate UMN History PhD candidate Jeff Hartman for receiving an award for best conference paper by a historian at the 98th Annual Conference of the Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Studies (SASS) in Fairbanks, Alaska this past spring. His paper, “Deforestation and Driftwood: Icelandic timber imports in light of the archaeology of dwelling construction,�? won the graduate student paper prize given by the Society for Historians of Scandinavia, and he received a cash award as well as a free lunch at the next conference. Jeff’s paper is also in the running for the Aurora Borealis Prize for best conference paper overall. Wish him good luck!