The 101st annual Meeting of the Medieval Academy of America will take place on March 19–21, 2026 on the campuses of the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Amherst College, and will also include events at Mt. Holyoke College and Smith College. Hosted by the Five College Consortium, the theme of the meeting is “Consortiums and Confluences.” “Consortium” denotes association but also implies consorting, or the willful union, sometimes unsanctioned, of distinct parties. By “confluences,” we mean the conjunction, be it actual or conceptual, of groups, individuals, and ideas–the flowing-together, intentionally or otherwise, of seemingly separate streams. In recognition of the five colleges that have come together to organize the Meeting, we suggest within this topic five broadly-construed threads that ask participants to consider mergings and separations, interactions between the one and the many, transitions, alignments, and misalignments. These five threads are open to scholars in all disciplines working on all aspects of the medieval world, as well as critical explorations of more recent interpretations of and engagements with the Middle Ages.
Our plenary lectures will be given by Elly Truitt (Associate Professor of History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania), Peggy McCracken (President of the Medieval Academy of America and Professor of French, Women’s Studies, and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan), and Jesús Rodríguez-Velasco (Augustus R. Street Professor of Spanish & Portuguese and Comparative Literature at Yale University).
Below, please find the call for papers. The deadline for submissions is Monday, 2 June 2025. Submit paper and session proposals here.
Journeys, Pathways, and Process
This thread explores the idea of movement and traversal to highlight the complex interconnections between medieval experiences, outlooks, and ways of knowing. We invite papers that explore rituals or practices of movement, guided and misguided advance, travel on local or global scales, and movement in forms and patterns of composition or construction. Some possible approaches: routes of transmission, exchange, migration, or wandering; architectural, geographical, spatial motions; courses or pathways in the natural world; mystical journeys, speculative undertakings; temporality and historiography; style and form in art, history, and literature; pathways of intellection; interplays of racialized, gendered and/or animal being; choreography, dance, pilgrimage; and routes toward cultural, religious, or political confluence.
Technologies of Knowledge
This thread addresses intersections, discontinuities, and productive tensions between premodern epistemologies and technologies. We invite papers that consider the relationships between knowledge formation and its material substrates. Although scholasticism has given the Middle Ages a reputation for tendentious abstraction, medieval instruments–parchment, styli, diagrams, maps, automata, navigational aids, optical devices, books of translation–tell a different story of the relationship between knowledge and materiality. Papers in this thread might consider the questions: How did medieval approaches to knowledge inform, and how were they informed by, available or imagined technologies? How were medieval disciplinarity, aesthetics, translation practices, or poetics informed by premodern technologies and material literacies? We also invite approaches that engage with contemporary techo-methodologies such as digital humanities or media theory.
Ecologies and Environments
This thread examines human and more-than-human relations with built and unbuilt environments of the premodern world, exploring how new identities, cooperations, divisions, and crises were forged through ecological change. How were cooperative and competitive theories and practices of organized agriculture, conservation, sustainability, collective health, and terraqueous resource ownership, management, and exploitation shaped by knowledge of and interactions with the natural world? How did encounters with and responses to catastrophes like disease, food shortage, earthquake, or flood unite and divide across political, religious, linguistic, legal, and cultural boundaries? How were discourses of shared, contested, and destroyed environments reflected in art, literature, philosophical thought, cartography, and ethnography?
Divergence, Disjunction, Dispersion
This thread explores moments of fragmentation, separation, and diffusion across intellectual, geographical, cultural, linguistic, political, and disciplinary divides. How do moments and movements of disjunction shape medieval communities, texts, and traditions, and by extension, the ways we study them? In what ways do disjunctions produce creative reconfigurations or new forms of connection? We also invite reflections on concepts of exile, diaspora, and deviance, especially those that help us understand the way medieval communities navigated disruption and redefined belonging. How do experiences of displacement or marginalization reshape medieval identities and cultural production? What affordances might have come from transgression of boundaries, whether physical, social, or intellectual, as people reimagined connections across divides? We invite papers that explore the divisions that occur among peoples, ideas, and objects and what they reveal about our disciplines.
Embodiments and Materialities
This thread brings together considerations of the physical, the material, and the corporeal as sites of communication and contact. Papers might address the role of the material in foregrounding production, or they might contemplate the body as a determining factor in reception, considering issues of race, gender, and disability. Presentations might also concentrate on the indeterminate boundaries between the animate and inanimate, and how bodies and material objects collaborate with one other, or alternatively how they might operate at cross purposes.
The Program Committee also invites papers and panels that interrogate present sociohistorical conjunctures and reflect on how medievalists can shape the next century of Medieval Studies. Potential approaches might consider how excavating archives of the medieval past can shape or effect change in the broader social and cultural landscape; ancient-to-medieval histories of Palestine and matters pertaining to the modern reception of this history; the deep histories of genocidal violence; and the history and future of scholarly activism within Medieval Studies. Papers or panels on these topics can be submitted as standalones or as part of any of the individual threads.
Individuals may either propose individual papers or a full panel of papers and speakers, using the link provided below. Paper proposals should include the individual’s name, professional affiliation (including independent scholar), contact information, paper title, and a brief (c. 150-word) abstract. Session proposals should include the name and contact information for the session organizer, the session title, a c. 500-word abstract, and information for each of the session participants (including proposed chairs and respondents). Those submitting paper and session proposals also will be asked to indicate the thread(s) with which their contributions might best be associated. All submissions are due by Monday, 2 June 2025. If you have any questions, please direct them to the Program Committee chairs at MAA2026@themedievalacademy.org.
Submit paper and session proposals here.
Organizing Committee
Jenny Adams, UMass (co-chair)
Ingrid Nelson, Amherst College (co-chair)
Joshua Birk, Smith College (co-chair)
Samuel Barber, Mount Holyoke College
Jessica Barr, UMass
Sonja Drimmer, UMass
Albert Lloret, UMass
Yiyi Luo, UMass
Evan MacCarthy, UMass
Stacey Murrell, Amherst College
Jutta Sperling, Hampshire College
Wesley Yu, Mount Holyoke College
