Medieval & Renaissance

The UT History department offers an MA and PhD concentration in European history before 1600, working closely with the Marco Institute for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Candidates receive their degrees in History, but are encouraged to participate widely in the interdisciplinary life of the Institute, which brings together faculty and graduate students from eight different departments at the University. Within the medieval and Renaissance History concentration, students are encouraged to focus in one of the department’s areas of strength: Mediterranean History, Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, the Crusades and Christian-Muslim relations, Medieval and Renaissance Intellectual History, and Renaissance and Reformation in England and on the Continent.

Our faculty (Robert Bast, Palmira Brummett, Thomas Burman, J.P. Dessel, Michael Kulikowski, J.L. McIntosh, Jay Rubenstein) have won numerous national and international awards, including the NEH, ACLS, Fulbright, the Guttenberg E-prize and, most recently, the Macarthur Fellowship awarded to Jay Rubenstein. We publish widely and actively encourage graduate participation in the scholarly world. We are supported by faculty in other departments who serve on graduate committees and take part in training students in the technical linguistic and methodological tools that are necessary to study medieval and Renaissance history. There are presently more than a dozen students working on graduate degrees on the Middle Ages and Renaissance in the History Department. Recent and ongoing dissertation topics include ‘Written in the Stars: Albertus Magnus’ Speculum astronomiae and its Readers’, ‘Elizabeth I as Civic Humanist’, ‘The Marshals of Aëtius’, ‘William Tyndale: The Intellectual and Religious Development of a Humanist Translator’. Through the Marco Institute, this cadre of graduate students joins another two dozen from other departments, all of whom take part in numerous annual activities, including scholarly symposia, ongoing research seminars in Mediterranean Late Antiquity, Renaissance Humanism, and British Studies, and are eligible for travel and research awards, as well as a dissertation-writing prize. The Middle Ages and Renaissance are a key part of the University Library’s collections and UT has all the resources necessary to conduct original research in Marco Institute fields, including complete sets of the Patrologia Latina and Graeca; the Corpus Christianorum; the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, the Rolls Series, the Acta Sanctorum, as well as important databases like the Early English Books Online (EEBO).

 

 

 

Contact Information

Department of History
915 Volunteer Blvd.
6th Floor Dunford Hall
Knoxville, TN 37996-4065

Phone: (865) 974-5421
Fax: (865) 974-3915
Email: kharriso@utk.edu