Adam G Beaver » conferences

NEH summer seminar

Adam — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 17:05:13 +0000

For all those interested in Mediterranean history, I heartily encourage you to apply to the 2012 NEH summer seminar on “Networks and Knowledge: Synthesis and Innovation in the Muslim-Christian-Jewish Medieval Mediterranean,” 2–27 July (Barcelona). An earlier round of the seminar generated not only some exciting work, but also the foundation of the Spain-North Africa Project.

Hebraists: expect the Spanish Inquisition

Adam — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 18:09:51 +0000

Next week will find me in Charlottesville, VA, for what is shaping up to be a fantastic symposium on the Spanish Inquisition organized by Alison Weber. (The program, in PDF, is here.) I’ll be speaking about the fate of Christian Hebraism in the Spanish Counterreformation. As many students of the subject know, the Inquisition abruptly turned on the community of hebraist biblical scholars in the 1570s, arresting and trying Luis de León, Gaspar de Grajal, and others. While this apparently anti-hebraist campaign has long been seen as a decisive moment in Spain’s long slide into intellectual irrelevance—yet another example of Inquisitorial repression retarding Spain’s path to Enlightenment and modernity—I want to argue that the story is more complex than that. For one thing, I think that we need to ask not just what the Inquisitors thought they were doing in the 1570s—a question which other scholars have answered by highlighting the hebraists’ Protestant and Jewish connections, whether personal or intellectual—but also why, if Protestantism and Judaism were part of the mix, the Inquisition had not acted sooner against earlier generations of hebraists.

In any case, I’m looking forward to the symposium, and hope to see many readers there…

European Tour

Adam — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 18:03:47 +0000

I’m currently getting ready to leave this weekend for about five weeks in Europe. The first stop is London, where I’ll be participating in a conference on Historia Sacra in the Renaissance. (See brochure here, in PDF.) Then it’s off to Spain, for some research in Madrid and Simancas.

Lope de Vega, historian?

Adam — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 02:14:17 +0000

This weekend, I’ll return to the annual Patristic, Medieval, and Renaissance Conference hosted by the Augustinian Institute at Villanova University. I was last there in 2007, on a panel on Renaissance historia sacra with Kate Elliott van Liere and Howard Louthan. This time I’ll be joining Kate and Katrina Olds for a panel on “Visions of the Christian Past in Golden Age Spain.” (See the program here.) While Kate and Katrina take on scholarly historia sacra as performed by Ambrosio de Morales and Jerónimo Román de la Higuera, I’ll be looking at the conflation of history and epic in Lope de Vega’s Jerusalén conquistada. (Incidentally, 2009 marks the fourth centennial of its first publication.) In a nutshell, I’ll be arguing that Lope’s attempt to rewrite the history of Spain’s participation in the Crusades—which, predictably, he justified by invoking poetic license and quite a lot of specious historical reasoning—is not simply a literary phenomenon to be left to literature scholars, but rather a significant challenge to all subsequent historiography on the subject. Though it’s hardly a new observation, I want to remind medievalists that much of what we think we know about the Middle Ages has been pre-sifted by early modern scholars and poets; even when we think that we are seeing past their obviously erroneous readings, we are nevertheless influenced in more subtle ways by their method.

Spring 2009: From Northern Europe to Southern California

Adam — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 22:50:19 +0000

This will be a busy spring for me, as on top of the usual teaching and research schedule I’ll be giving several papers. A quick note about the two on which I’ve been working most recently:

In early March, I’ll be in Oslo, Norway for a conference, organized by Halvor Moxnes, on “Holy Land as Homeland.” While most of the speakers focus on the supposed origins of modern biblical criticism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, I’m planning to use my paper—entitled “Nihil sub sole novum? Early Modern Approaches to the Holy Land”—to encourage the group to look further back, to the Renaissance, for important precedents for later scholars’ historical and archaeological approach to biblical antiquity.

In mid-March, I’ll be at the Annual Meeting of the Renaissance Society of America in Los Angeles. Together with Daniel Stein Kokin and Marion Leathers Kuntz, I’ll be part of a panel on Early Modern Promised Lands. My paper, entitled “Nebuchadnezzar’s Jewish Legions,” traces the legend that Spain was settled by Jews from the Babylonian Captivity through its various incarnations in Renaissance historiography.

Renaissance Visions of Christian Origins

Adam — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 04:56:11 +0000

I recently returned from Grand Rapids, MI, where I attended a small conference on “Renaissance Visions of Christian Origins” organized by Kate van Liere, Howard Louthan, and Simon Ditchfield. The conference was marvelous, and I hope to post a some new thoughts about historia sacra here in the near future. In the meantime, though, I should mention one of the ancillary benefits of attending the conference: the opportunity to get to know Calvin College, and Grand Rapids, a little bit better. Calvin has a lovely campus and some very engaged students, and the Grand Rapids Art Museum has quite an impressive collection of prints. Not to be outdone are the Meijer Gardens, a nature preserve-cum-sculpture garden patronized by the supermarket moguls of the same name. Among the open air exhibits we found Bill Woodrow‘s “Listening to History.” Not exactly the most enticing portrait of historical study, is it? However long the hours and hard the work of our conference, at least it never came to this…

Adam wins Meyer Prize

Adam — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 16:43:04 +0000

I’ve recently returned from the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference, where I received the 2007 Carl S. Meyer Prize for the paper I delivered last year (entitled “A Holy Land for the Catholic Monarchy: Spanish Reconstructions of Palestine, 1469‚Äì1598;” see here for the abstract). The Meyer Prize, as the SCSC website explains, “is awarded annually for the best paper delivered at the yearly meeting by a scholar who is still in graduate school or has earned the Ph.D. in the last five years.”

I’m honored by the distinction, and pleased that so many found the paper of interest!

A Teaching Conference

Adam — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 19:07:48 +0000

In addition to the two research papers I’ll be presenting this month (see “Two October Conferences,” below), in November I’ll also be heading out to Worcester, MA to participate in the New England Faculty Development Consortium (NEFDC)’s fall Teaching Conference. I’ll be joining forces with Cassandra Volpe Horii from Harvard’s Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning (where I used to be a Lead Teaching Fellow) to lead a “Case Discussion on Video-based Faculty/TA Consultations: Handling the Challenges.” (You can read the abstract on p. 6 of the conference program.)

For anyone in the Greater Boston/New England area and interested in teaching, I highly recommend registering and attending the conference!

Two October conferences

Adam — Sat, 08 Sep 2007 22:07:15 +0000

October will be a busy month for me, as I’ll be presenting papers at two conferences. The weekend of 19-21 October I’ll be in Philadelphia for the Patristic, Medieval, and Renaissance Studies Conference at Villanova; then, the weekend of 24-28 October, I’ll be in Minneapolis for the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference. In both cases, I’ll be fortunate to share the floor with co-panelists whose work I very much admire. At PMR my paper, entitled “Believing is Seeing: The Holy Land among the Antiquarians,” forms part of a panel on “Historical Imagination and Religious Origins in the Later Renaissance,” and my co-panelists are Kate van Liere (Calvin College) and Howard Louthan (University of Florida); Emmet McLaughlin (Villanova University) will chair. At SCSC, I’ll be part of a panel on “Early Modern Spanish Constructions of National and Imperial Identities” with Thomas Dandelet (UC Berkeley) and Nick Bomba (Princeton); James M. Boyden (Tulane) will chair.