Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies

From 1982 until 1994, ACMRS was directed by Jean R. Brink from the Department of English at ASU. Robert E. Bjork, also from the Department of English at ASU, directed the center from 1994 to 2018.

Starting in 2018, ACMRS is directed by Ayanna Thompson, Professor in the Department of English at Arizona State University.

In the spring of 1999, ACMRS established its Distinguished Lecture Series.[1] Initially, the Center brought one eminent scholar to ASU for a few days to present a public lecture, interact with upper-division and/or graduate classes, and meet informally with students and faculty.

The Distinguished Lecture series was reimagined in 2018 to support the mission of developing public-facing humanities programs that make premodern studies relevant to a contemporary, non-academic audience. In January of 2018, ACMRS hosted Peter Sellars for an evening dialogue entitled "Engaging the Past to Create the Avant Garde."

In January of 2019, ACMRS will be hosting Marlon James as the annual distinguished lecturer, for an event entitled "Reclaiming the Fantasy Novel."

In October of 2020, ACMRS will host Nnedi Okorafor as the Distinguished Lecturer for the 2020-21 academic year.

RaceB4Race is an ongoing conference series and professional network community by and for scholars of color working on issues of race in premodern literature, history and culture. RaceB4Race centers the expertise, perspectives, and sociopolitical interests of BIPOC scholars, whose work seeks to expand critical race theory.

Bridging many traditional disciplinary divides, RaceB4Race not only creates innovative scholarly dialogues, but also fosters social change within premodern studies as a whole.

The inaugural RaceB4Race conference emerged as a collaboration between the Medievalists of Color (MOC) and the ShakeRace (Shakespeare and Race) community, groups that were both seeking to push their fields in new archival, theoretical, methodological, pedagogical and practical directions.

The catalyst for the event was the rejection of proposals for sessions on race and antiracism by Medievalists of Color in favor of sessions proposed by their white colleagues by the International Congress of Medieval Studies (ICMS) in Kalamazoo, MI. RaceB4Race offered an “alternate home” for the rejected MOC sessions and a much-needed opportunity for a collaboration between the MOC and ShakeRace communities. In the end, the inaugural RaceB4Race event demonstrated to the world how our understandings of periodization, historicity and even academic disciplines can become more expansive once race is acknowledged as a viable lens of investigation.

The Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, in collaboration with The Huntington Library, offers annually the ACMRS Huntington Library Fellowship to aid in dissertation, post-doctoral or faculty research using the collections of The Huntington.

A requirement for holding the fellowship is that the time of tenure be spent in residence at The Huntington: the period of residence may vary, but must be a minimum of one month. The Huntington Library welcomes the inaugural ACMRS fellow with a $3,500 award for a one-month residency.

ACMRS offers a travel award to a graduate student to present a paper at the International Medieval Congress, held every May at the Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo.[2]

The Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies offers paid internships for ASU undergraduates. Interns earn hands-on experience in publishing, working directly with ACMRS staff and scholars on projects that will have a direct influence on the Center. Interns are paid $2,800 and can receive 3 credit hours.

The annual ACMRS Short-Term Residency will enable scholars who have earned a Ph.D. in a pre-modern field to pursue their research for a period of four to six weeks. The residency is designed to allow scholars to focus on finishing projects for publication. The Director of ACMRS and senior members of ACMRS’ in-house press can provide publishing advice and mentoring. Each resident will present their work in a public lecture, showcasing their scholarship. Opportunities for graduate student mentorship are also available.

Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies (MRTS) is a series of translations, studies, reference works, and editions including those of the Renaissance English Text Society (RETS). MRTS Online is a joint project between Iter and ACMRS to make select MRTS titles available in electronic format.

Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts in Microfiche Facsimile (ASMMF) is a project which makes available in microfiche nearly five hundred manuscripts containing Old English.[3]

Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History is a journal that provides an outlet for the presentation of scholarship that often falls outside the limitations of other publications. It publishes interpretive and historiographical essays that explore the ramifications of current scholarship or that treat issues and themes of interest to any historian of the pre-modern period.[4]

Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal is a joint publication of ACMRS and the University of Maryland. This journal publishes essays on women and gender during the years 1500-1700 from all geographical areas and across all relevant fields: European, African, Islamic, Asian, and colonial studies, as well as studies of literature, art, music, history, history of science, religion, and anthropology.[5]

In October 2010, ACMRS unveiled the Heritage Edition of the St. John's Bible[6] at its annual Distinguished Lecture in Medieval Studies. Dr. Rodney M. Thompson, Honorary Research Fellow at the School of History and Classics of the University of Tasmania, presented a lecture on the "Great Illuminated Bibles of 12th-Century England: A Study in Splendor" following the dedication of the specially-printed facsimile Bible.[7] The seven-volume Heritage Edition was donated by Phoenix resident, George Berkner, a 1956 Saint John's University graduate. It resides at the Universities' Special Collections in Hayden Library at ASU and in the offices of ACMRS.

In the Spring of 2004, ACMRS received a unique medieval statue as a donation from the Metropolitan Museum of Art docent, Jeri Garbaccio and her husband Charles. The gift was accepted in honor of Florence E. Nelson of Scottsdale, Arizona, and in memory of Renee Kra, former Managing Editor of Radiocarbon at the University of Arizona. The medieval figure is a three-foot wood polychromy seated king of Spanish origin, dating back to the second half of the thirteenth century. The statue is on display at the ACMRS main office in Tempe, Arizona.[8]