AVISTA sponsored three sessions, “Buildings that Aren’t Churches: The Wider Field of Medieval Architecture,” “New Approaches to Old Problems: Using Modern Technology to Investigate Medieval Material Culture,” and “Medieval Ales Revisited: the Continuing Debate about Hops and Gruit,” at this year’s ICMS at Kalamazoo, as well as a roundtable co-sponsored with ExARC, “Archaeology & Experiment: Moving Beyond the Artifacts.” Hannah Maryan Thomson, a doctoral student in art history at UCLA, won the Villard Prize for her outstanding paper “History in Stone: Visual Biography and Mythmaking in Ávila’s Medieval Walls.”
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, the Medieval Academy annual meeting, and other conferences of interest to our membership and to the field.
The 2020 AVISTA sessions at the ICMS in Kalamazoo will be particularly meaningful, as they are dedicated to two recently departed scholars, both of whom inspired many AVISTA members: Andrew Tallon and Robert Mark. In their honor, Robert Bork has organized a roundtable for colleagues to share personal perspectives and three sessions addressing interdisciplinarity, Gothic structure, and Notre-Dame de Paris. News on a reception will be forthcoming.
In publication news, The Long Lives of Medieval Art and Architecture, drawing from past sessions at Kalamazoo and Leeds, was published by Routledge in April 2019. Steven Walton’s edited volume, Fifty Years of Medieval Technology and Social Change, appeared this fall. A volume drawing from the articles in the AVISTA Forum Journal is in the works and will likely appear in 2021.
We appreciate your membership and look forward to a busy new year!