ND Medievalists Win Awards from ACIS

The Medieval Institute is pleased to congratulate MI Faculty Fellow and Assistant Professor of Irish Language and Literature Amy Mulligan and History Ph.D. candidate Lauren Jean on receiving awards from the American Conference of Irish Studies. 

Professor Mulligan is the recipient of the Donald Murphy Prize for Distinguished First Book for her book, A Landscape of Words: Ireland, Britain, and the Poetics of Space, 700-1250. According to the award committee, "Amy Mulligan’s A Landscape of Words: Ireland, Britain, and the Poetics of Space, 700-1250 offers a ground-breaking examination of why—and how—medieval people conceived of and described space, place, landscape, and environment. Focusing on what Mulligan describes as 'the "greatest hits" of (and about) medieval Ireland,' including Navigatio Sancti Brendani, Táin Bó Cúalgne, and Gerald of Wales’ Topographia, the book demonstrates how Ireland’s physical location (on the fringes of the known world) impacted the ways in which its inhabitants thought about themselves. The Irish, Mulligan argues, 'developed a literature that gave them, and the landscapes they occupied and wrote about, a central place in the medieval European imagination.' Peripherality was repeatedly reinterpreted 'as a marker of sanctity and accomplishment.' This is a fresh, thoughtful, exciting book whose concern with place, space, imagination, and belonging speaks to the interests and concerns of many scholars within and beyond medieval history. A Landscape of Words is published by Manchester University Press."

Lauren Jean, a History Ph.D. student, Irish Studies graduate minor, and the coordinator of the Keough-Naughton Irish Studies Graduate Working Group, is the recipient of the 2020 Larkin Dissertation Research Fellowship, which will allow her to visit archives in the United Kingdom. According to the award committee, "The 2020 Larkin Dissertation Research Fellowship is awarded to Lauren Jean, a PhD candidate at the University of Notre Dame. Jean’s work on late-Medieval and early modern Ireland utilizes an array of sources in Irish and English to demonstrate that honor was a concept that applied to all in Gaelic society, women and men, regardless of social station. Her close attention to genealogies, legal commentaries, bardic poetry, and medical texts—as well as to the colophons found on many of these manuscripts—enables her to discuss regional variations in the understanding of honor that suggest scholars ought to stop treating ‘Gaelic Ireland’ as an undifferentiated whole. Moreover, she seeks to place her study of honor as understood in Ireland into conversation with emerging scholarship on the contemporaneous communities in Spanish-America and South Asia, thus creating a transnational study that promises to reshape our view of early modern Ireland. Jean intends to use the Larkin Fellowship to visit archives in the United Kingdom holding manuscripts that will prove essential to her study."

We are happy to see the Notre Dame medievalist community so well represented at the ACIS this year. See the full list of 2019–2020 ACIS award winners here.