2025-11-19
- The shortlist for the 2026 Laura Shannon Prize in Contemporary European Studies has been named. The Nanovic Institute for European Studies at the University of Notre Dame’s Keough School of Global Affairs administers this prize, one of the preeminent book prizes in the field of European studies that carries an award of $10...
2025-11-09 - Visiting scholar Ryan Low (University of North Dakota) drew a large audience to his fascinating talk on the records produced by public notaries in late-medieval Provence. As he showed, virtually all social and economic relations could be guaranteed by a notarial act by the end of the fourteenth century, such that reliance on the written word affected even the region's most remote rural...
2025-10-08 - Our medieval acting troupe of Illinois students, faculty, staff, and alumni restaged The Road to Calvary on Saturday, October 4th: a black comedy about bumbling soldiers tasked with bringing Jesus and the cross to Calvary, as part of the Humanities Open House. This was one of the two plays which we contributed to an epic production of the Corpus Christi Cycle at the...
2025-09-29 - Our awesome new sticker!
2025-09-18 - For centuries, syphilis and other treponemal diseases (bejel and yaws) were understood as “New World” exports, brought to Afro-Eurasia as part of the Columbian Exchange after 1492. But recent paleopathology and aDNA studies have demonstrated the presence of these diseases in the “Old World,” too, while Dr. Salmon’s own...
2025-09-01 - Our medieval acting troupe of Illinois students, faculty, staff, and alumni participated in an epic production of the Corpus Christi Cycle at...
2025-09-01 - We are delighted that Kalani Craig has joined us as a faculty affiliate in Medieval Studies! Professor Craig's research and teaching specialties converge at the intersection of digital methodologies and medieval history. She uses digital methods like text mining, spatial history, and network analysis to explore conflict in medieval European history and trains students and...
2025-05-14 - Xin Wen (文欣) is an historian of medieval China and Inner Asia (PhD Harvard University) and an associate professor in the Departments of East Asian Studies and History at Princeton University. His first book, the prizewinning The King’s Road: Diplomacy and the Remaking of the Silk Road (Princeton University Press, 2023), re-...
2024-12-17 - The newest issue of Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies *Volume 100, Number 1* (January 2025), marks the Medieval Academy of America's Centennial with a spotlight on "Medieval Studies and Its Institutions." The lead article is a collaboration among three scholars representing the Program in Medieval Studies at Illinois: Carol Symes (History), D. Fairchild Ruggles (Islamic Art...
2024-10-15 - This fall, we are thrilled to have added thirteen new faculty to the Program in Medieval Studies: scholars from the fields of Anthropology, Art History, Classics, English, History, Library and Information...
2024-04-12 - The Program in Medieval Studies is delighted to congratulate Prof. Hermann von Hesse, whose recent fellowship award will support the research and writing on his book project: Love of Stone Houses: Urban Merchants, Ancestral Spaces and Sacred Objects on Africa’s Gold Coast, 1700-1890.
2024-04-10 - Prof. Padraic Rohan -- Transforming Empire: The Genoese from the Crusades to Columbus
2024-04-05 - Medieval Black London: The Before Lives of the Archive of Transatlantic Slavery