PIMSPontifical Institute
of
Mediaeval Studies

Charles Burnett is Professor of the History of Arabic/Islamic Influences in Europe at the Warburg Institute, University of London, and Co-Director of the Centre for the History of Arabic Studies in Europe. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, Corresponding Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America, and Fellow of the International Society for the History of Science. He is leader of the Humanities in the European Research Area project on Encounters with the Orient in Early Modern European Scholarship (EOS). 

Giovanni Gasbarri received his doctorate in 2015 from Sapienza Università di Roma with a dissertation entitled “Lo studio dell’arte bizantina a Roma e in Italia tra ‘800 e ‘900. Un nuovo indirizzo della storiografia nel constest europeo.” He published Riscoprire Bizanzio. Lo studio dell’arte bizantina a Roma e in Italia tra ‘800 e ‘900 in 2015, and expects a second book to appear in 2016, A cent’anni da Bertaux. L’arte in Basilicata settentrionale tra Bizantini e Normanni. Among his several articles, Dr. Gasbarri published “The contributions of the Italian Art Press to the rediscovery of Byzantium at the turn of the Twentieth Century,” in The Art Press in the Twentieth Century (Visual Resources: An International Journal of Documentation, Special Issue, March 2015), pp. 31-43. As a Mellon Fellow, Dr. Gasbarri will explore the visualization of idolatry in Byzantium between the 9th and 15th centuries.

Magda Hayton received her doctorate in 2015 from the University of Toronto with a dissertation entitled “Inflection of Prophetic Vision: The Reshaping of Hildegard of Bingen’s Apocalypticism as Represented by Abridgments of the Pentachronon.” Since 2014 Dr. Hayton has been an Associate Research Member at the Centre for Research on Religion at McGill University. She published “Pierre d’Ailly’s De falsis prophetis II and the Collectiones of William of Saint-Amour,” Viator 44 No. 2 (2013): 243-266. Her Mellon research project at the Institute is called “Cistercians, Mendicants, and Secular Masters: Hildegardian Apocalypticism in Thirteenth-Century Europe.”

Robert Shaw earned his doctorate in 2014 from Oriel College, Oxford University, with a dissertation entitled “The Celestine Monks of France c. 1350-1450: Monastic Reform in an Age of Schism, Council and War.” He is presently revising the dissertation for publication. Together with Hannah Skoda, Patrick Lantschner, Guilhem Pepin, and Tiago Viula de Faria, he co-edited Contact and Exchange in Later Medieval Europe: Essays in Honour of Malcolm Vale, Boydell and Brewer, 2012. As a Mellon Fellow, Dr. Shaw will focus on the Observant religious reform culture(s) of later medieval France up to the eve of the Reformation.

Justine L. Trombley was awarded the PhD in Medieval History at the University of St. Andrews in 2014 with a dissertation entitled “The Mirror Broken Anew: The Manuscript Evidence for Opposition to Marguerite Porete’s Latin Mirror of Simple Souls in the Later Middle Ages.” She has submitted an article to the Journal of Medieval History, “New Evidence on the Origins of the Latin Mirror of Simple Souls from a forgotten Paduan Manuscript; in 2010 she published “The Master and the Mirror: The Influence of Marguerite Porete on Meister Eckhart,” in Magistra: A Journal of Women’s Spirituality in History 16:1 (2010): 60-102. For her Mellon Fellowship, Dr. Trombley will continue her work on Marguerite Porete by producing a book based on her dissertation.

Richard F. Gyug (AB, Carleton University; MA, PhD, University of Toronto; MSL, Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies) is a Research Fellow at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, and Professor at the Department of History, Fordham University. He is also the author of numerous publications on liturgical books in southern Italy and Dalmatia, and social history in medieval Catalonia. ...

Linda Safran is writing a textbook on medieval art and architecture (with two colleagues), under contract with Cornell University Press. Another project for this year is an article on Byzantine diagrams of the Trinity, which will appear in a volume on Byzantine, Western Medieval, and Islamic diagrams that she is co-editing with Jeffrey Hamburger and David Roxburgh of Harvard. Recent and forthcoming publications include ...

Alain J. Stoclet was educated at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (Licence, Agrégation) and at the University of Toronto's Centre for Medieval Studies (PhD). He has held a variety of teaching and research positions in Toronto and in Lyon, France, and is currently also associated with the Centre for Medieval Studies as well being a member of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique's Unité Mixte de Recherche (UMR) 5648 (Lyon).

Maureen Boulton is a professor of French at the University of Notre Dame who studies medieval French literature, particularly the relation between narrative and lyric poetry and also religious literature. She has edited two fourteenth-century texts, the Old French Evangile de l’Enfance (1984) and a related text in Anglo-Norman, the Enfaunces de Jesu Crist (1986). Her third book, The Song in the Story, a study of lyric quotations in 13th- and 14th-century romances, was published in 1993. She collaborated with Ruth J. Dean on Anglo-Norman Literature. A Guide to Texts and Manuscripts, which was awarded the Prix Chavée by the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres (Paris). A volume of translations, Piety and Persecution in the French Texts of England appeared in 2013, and Sacred Fictions of Medieval France appeared last year. She is currently editing a volume of essays on literary responses to the Fourth Lateran Council.  

Kevin Reynolds holds a Ph.D. in Italian Studies from the University of Toronto and teaches at York University, primarily in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Linguistics. He has also taught full-time at Montreal’s Concordia University and as a graduate course instructor and sessional instructor at the University of Toronto (St. George and Mississauga campuses).

Antonio Ricci, the Institute’s 2016-2017 York Fellow, holds a Ph.D. from the University of Toronto. He is currently Associate Professor of Italian Studies and Humanities at York University, and he has also taught at Fordham University. He is a book historian with research interests in the print culture of Renaissance Italy, particularly the publishing industry in sixteenth-century Florence and the printing history of the Orlando Furioso. During his fellowship year at PIMS, he will study the medieval origins of early modern reading practices.

Dr Sharmain van Blommestein is Associate Professor in the Department of English and Communications, SUNY Potsdam and Visiting Scholar of the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies 2016–2017. She specializes in Medieval and Renaissance literature, Feminist Theory, and Women’s and Gender Studies. She recently published “Medieval Redemptive Suffering: Female Mystical Expressions of Pain and Pleasure and Medieval Society’s Influence on Mystical Spirituality,” The International Journal of Religion and Spirituality in Society 4.2 (2014): 39–53. While at the Institute Dr van Blommestein will conduct research and work on her book, Writing on the Skin: The Language of Pain and the Body as a Battleground of Religious and Personal Empowerment.