Posted by Helen Birkett
23 September 2020It’s the start of a new academic year at Exeter and many things are different. We can’t teach, research, or meet together as a community in quite the same way as before. But we’ve adapted and found workarounds – and it’s no different for the Centre’s Medieval Research Seminar!
We have a full programme of seminars scheduled for this year, details of which are on the Centre’s webpage. Until further notice, our seminars will meet online. As usual, we will host two public lectures. We’re pleased to announce that John Tolan is giving the Barton Lecture in December, while Elisabeth van Houts will give the Orme Lecture in March. These lectures will be open to all – although we’re still working out the logistics of this! Invitations to the other seminars will be sent out via the Centre’s mailing list. If you’re not on the mailing list and would like to attend a particular talk, then please get in touch with the seminar organisers, Helen Birkett (H.Birkett@exeter.ac.uk) or Levi Roach (L.Roach@exeter.ac.uk).
Moving online has also offered us new opportunities. We are no longer constrained by a travel budget, which means that we can host more international speakers – and we’ll be hearing from scholars based in the US and France this year. The shift online has also encouraged us to experiment with the seminar format. We’ve offered speakers the options of giving a standard 45-minute talk, doing a shorter ‘Show and Tell’ session (where speakers introduce us to a particular source or research question), or taking part in a 40-minute interview with a member of staff. We hope that this will keep our online audiences engaged and increase the chance for discussion.
Research seminars play a crucial role in maintaining our sense of community at the Centre. It’s where a disparate set of medievalists come together to hear new ideas, meet new scholars, and to interact with each other. We managed to keep these seminars going in May and June, which helped to ease feelings of isolation created by lockdown. Hopefully, this year’s seminar series will continue to add a small sense of normality to this very abnormal time.
Our first scheduled event, the AGM and welcome meeting, will take place on 14 October, just after our MA programmes start. We look forward to seeing members of the Centre then – and non-members at later events!