AVISTA sponsored a well-attended session, “Restoring Medieval Buildings,” at the Medieval Academy of America’s annual meeting in Atlanta in March. This year at Kalamazoo we sponsored “Enchanted Environs: Architecture, Automata, and the Art of Mechanical Performance I and II,” led by Zachary Stewart and Amy Gillette; “Experimental Archaeology,” led by Sean Winslow and co-sponsored by ExARC; a roundtable on experimental pedagogy, cosponsored by TEAMS (Teaching Association for Medieval Studies) and also led by Sean Winslow; and “Learning in Action: Geometry and Cathedral Design,” a demonstration of laying out led by Jennifer Feltman. Steven Walton also demonstrated the casting of pewter pilgrims’ badges to an appreciative audience. Scott Miller won the Villard Prize for “The Park of Hesdin and Its Automata under the Early Valois (1384–1404).”
The 2019 sessions at Kalamazoo include “Buildings that Aren’t Churches: The Wider Field of Medieval Architecture” and “New Approaches to Old Problems: Using Modern Technology to Investigate Medieval Material Culture,” as well as a session co-sponsored with ExARC, “Archaeology & Experiment: Moving Beyond the Artifacts.” We hope to see many of our members at Kalamazoo this year, and to hear from our membership about potential topics for future conferences. We would love to sponsor more sessions at Leeds, the Society of Architectural Historians annual meeting, and other conferences of interest to our membership and to the field.
In publication news, The Long Lives of Medieval Art and Architecture, drawing from past sessions at Kalamazoo and Leeds, will be forthcoming from Routledge in April 2019. Steven Walton’s edited volume, Fifty Years of Medieval Technology and Social Change, is also forthcoming in our Routledge line. A volume drawing from the articles in the AVISTA Forum Journal is in the works.
Finally, we are deeply saddened by the death of Andrew Tallon on November 16th of this year. Andrew, an Associate Professor of Art History at Vassar, was an innovative and generous scholar of Gothic architecture, and a longtime member of AVISTA; we will greatly miss him. His obituary in the Poughkeepsie Journal may be found here.