NEW!

CARRIE BENES (Assistant Professor of Medieval and Renaissance History, New College of Florida) has won the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Rome Prize in Medieval Studies to spend a year at the American Academy in Rome for her project, SPQR Transformed: Post-Classical Fortunes of a Classical Acronym: "Completion of a book manuscript exploring the diverse uses and interpretations of the SPQR acronym in the politics, ideology, and iconography of medieval and early modern Italy (c. 600-1600). In the classical period, SPQR was a conventional abbreviation for the formulaic senatus populusque Romanus, referring to the Roman state; by contrast, its contemporary incarnation as Rome’s municipal coat of arms—gold lettering on scarlet—is chiefly a visual, civic symbol. This shift of both form and meaning took place in the Middle Ages, during which the acronym in various forms was used in turn to support imperial, populist, oligarchic, and papal sovereignties over the city. My project on the post-classical afterlife of one of the world’s most famous acronyms will reveal not only the important role played by Roman history in medieval and early modern culture, but also the dense semiotic webs within which that exchange took place. "

GIOVANNI BENADUSI (History, University of South Florida) has been awarded a one-year fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies for 2007-08 to complete research for her book, Visions of Social Order: Women's Last Wills, Notaries and the State in Late Renaissance and Baroque Tuscany.

ANNE LATOWSKY (World Languages, University of South Florida) is the winner of the 2007 Van Courtlandt Elliott Prize, given annually by the Medieval Academy of America for an outstanding first article in medieval studies. She won the prize for her article, "Foreign Embassies and Roman Universality in Einhard's Life of Charlemagne," Florilegium 22 (2005), 25-57.

FLORIN CURTA (History, University of Florida) received a postdoctoral fellowship in Southeast European Studies from the American Council of Learned Societies, a membership in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, and a senior fellowship at Dumbarton Oaks in Byzantine Studies (2006-07). He will be at Dumbarton Oaks in fall 2006 and at the Institute for Advanced Studies in spring 2007. His project title is "Greece in the early Middle Ages: a social and economic history", and he is preparing a book for the Edinburgh University Press series on the history of Greece (edited by Thomas Gallant, U of York). At the Institute for Advanced Studies, he will be carrying out a project on cave monasticism.

JAMES D'EMILIO (Humanities, University of South Florida) was awarded the 2005 Bishko Memorial Prize by the Society for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies for the best article published in 2005 by a North American scholar in the field of medieval Iberian history: “The Royal Convent of Las Huelgas: Dynastic Politics, Religious Reform and Artistic Change in Medieval Castile”, Studies in Cistercian Art and Architecture, ed. M. P. Lillich, VI (2005), 191-282.

FELICE LIFSHITZ (History, Florida International University) will be in residence at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey (Sept. 2, 2006 through August 15, 2007). Her year is funded partly by a Membership in the School of Historical Studies of the IAS and partially by sabbatical pay from Florida International University. The title of her project is "Gender and Manuscript Culture in the Carolingian Valley of the Main."

PETER L. LARSON has joined the History Department at the University of Central Florida (fall 2006). He has recently published Conflict and Compromise in the Late Medieval Countryside: Lords and Peasants in Durham, 1348-1400 (Routledge).

GREGORY MILTON (Ph.D., UCLA, 2004) has joined the History Department at the University of South Florida (Tampa) as an Assistant Professor (fall 2006).

MICHELLE WARREN (formerly of the University of Miami) has accepted a position (fall 2006) as Associate Professor of Comparative Literature in the Comparative Literature Program at Dartmouth University.