Medieval Academy News

President's Column

Reading the Medieval Academy News online, you are already acquainted with one of the ways the Academy has entered the twenty-first century. Other modernizations are also in place, and more will soon be announced.

Cambridge University Press will publish Speculum according to an agreement that Paul E. Szarmach (Executive Director) and Patrick Geary (President 2008–2009) negotiated with great skill last year after weighing proposals from other presses. Although you may not notice any difference when the familiar ivory-grey volume arrives in your mail at the start of 2010, you will benefit from the new arrangement in a number of ways. In addition to being able to consult back issues through JSTOR as in the past, you will now also gain access electronically to current volumes through your institution (if it has chosen to receive the journal online). Moreover, if your work appears in Speculum, you will know that it is available to a much wider audience than it would have been because of CUP's world-wide marketing strategy and online networks. Taking advantage of the Press's experience with electronic publishing, the Medieval Academy is on its way to instituting a system that will enable contributors to submit articles electronically and Speculum's editors to navigate the submissions through the processes of vetting and editing. And the arrangement offers members such other benefits as a 20% discount on Cambridge University Press books.

The Medieval Academy Council has acted to coordinate the work of the Committee on Electronic Resources (chaired by Dot Porter) and the Electronic Editions Advisory Board (chaired by Daniel Paul O'Donnell) by means of a new Digital Initiatives Advisory Board (jointly chaired), charged with expanding digital scholarship in our field. And a committee headed by Grover Zinn (comprising Robert Bjork, Madeline Caviness, Susan Crane, and Gabriele Spiegel) is working to capitalize on these developments to transform the Academy's IT more generally.

Even at this difficult moment in the world's financial cycle, the MAA is doing reasonably well, largely because of the work of the Finance Committee and our Treasurer Barbara Shailor. The contract with CUP should produce both savings and income. For the first time in its history, the Academy has established an Indirect Cost Rate; thanks to the Executive Director's persistence in securing it, the new IDC has not only added to the coffers already but also creates a precedent that should continue to yield dividends. During my tenure as President, I shall be seeking additional funding, especially to subsidize the IT initiatives; and I am working closely with First Vice President, Elizabeth A. R. Brown, to assure continuity in these efforts after my term ends in March.

Improvements in technology and financial resources are significant, of course, only if the Academy expands its purview and promotes intellectual activity. To that end, the Council has already acted to include a representative of the Graduate Student Committee in its deliberations at the annual meetings; in Chicago, Jennifer Feltman spoke eloquently in the GSC's interests and Kristin Canzano Pinyan, her successor, will surely continue to provide forceful student representation this year in New Haven. If you are a student reading this letter, I encourage you to become active in the GSC so that the Council hears your voice too.

As important, even while strengthening its core mission, the Academy is steadily opening up to sub-disciplines and cultural areas that, rightly or wrongly, have been perceived to be marginal in the organization, musicology, for instance, the eastern Mediterranean, or Celtic studies. The new technologies and the CUP initiative themselves will help to accommodate this broadening; Speculum, for instance, will be able to improve its use of pictures and sound; it will also realize its own guidelines which state clearly that "the primary emphasis is on western Europe, but Arabic, Byzantine, Hebrew, and Slavic studies are also included." The appointment of a Book Review Editor for Islamic studies has already resulted in the greatly increased number of reviews in the field that appear in our journal. And following a tradition that goes back to the very founding of the Academy, the election of a Byzantinist, Alice-Mary Talbot, as Second Vice President makes the comprehensiveness patent. I, myself, am a member of the Scholarly Community for the Globalization of the "Middle Ages," established by Susan Noakes and Geraldine Heng to encourage both students and scholars to think broadly about the field and to consider such interconnections as the "Silk Road."

Even before I became an officer of the Academy, I was impressed by the remarkable vitality of scholarship on the Middle Ages as manifested year after year by the papers and book displays at its annual meetings, and those at Kalamazoo and Leeds as well. Now, I am learning firsthand how the Academy is considering new ways to tap that energy. The Zinn Committee is preparing recommendations to the Council that would institute further changes in the structure of the organization and in its capacity to deploy its resources more effectively. One goal is to make the best and most interesting research appealing and accessible, not only to students and scholars specializing in a subject, but also to other medievalists and in the broader intellectual community.

At the start of the third millennium, then, the Medieval Academy of America is deploying technologies available in the present, and innovative thinking, to assure that the medieval past has an enduring and very bright future.

—Herbert L. Kessler

The Medieval Academy News is published on a continuing basis by the

Medieval Academy of America
104 Mt. Auburn St., 5th Floor
Cambridge, MA 02138-5019.

Editor: Mary-Jo Arn (MA@MedievalAcademy.org)

All items are subject to editing.

©2009. The Medieval Academy of America