Helen Damico Memorial Lecture Series
Since 1987, the University of New Mexico and the Institute for Medieval Studies have proudly hosted the IMS Spring Lecture Series, an annual celebration of world-class scholarship and research on the UNM campus. The series has attracted such luminaries as Christopher de Hamel, Michelle P. Brown, Annemarie Weyl Carr, Paul Freedman, and more! These lectures are an amazing opportunity for students and members of the public to interact with leaders in the many fields of medieval research and to see presentations of their current work first-hand.
Helen Damico, IMS Founder
Helen Damico was a Professor of English Medieval Language and Literature at the University of New Mexico. She was selected twice as an Outstanding Teacher and honored as a UNM Presidential Teaching Fellow. She founded the Institute of Medieval Studies, was a recipient of the New Mexico Humanities Award for Lifetime Contributions to the Humanities, a member of the Medieval Academy of America and recipient of its CARA Award for Outstanding Service to Medieval Studies, and was also an Honorary Member of the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists.
After attending a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute for College Teachers at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts in 1981, Helen was inspired to create our interdisciplinary Institute dedicated to Medieval Studies here at UNM. She also established the IMS Spring Lecture Series, as well as a variety of other academic pursuits that brought her passion for Medieval and Old English studies to her students and the broader UNM community.
Helen passed away on April 14, 2020. In remembrance of our beloved founder and her tremendous legacy, the Institute for Medieval Studies hosted its "first" Helen Damico Memorial Lecture Series in the Spring of 2021. Since then, the lecture series has only grown in popularity and influence.
The 40th Annual Helen Damico Memorial Lecture Series: Homecoming
April 20 - April 23, 2026
Full Schedule:
Monday, April 20
3:30 pm – Keller Hall
Musical Performance by the UNM Early Music Ensemble in Keller Hall at 3:30 pm.
Directed by Dr. Colleen Sheinberg, Professor, Department of Music at the University of New Mexico
5:30 pm – Science and Math Learning Center Auditorium, SMLC 102
“Three Ways of Looking at the Cler's Tale, or Griselde Comes Home”
Lecture by Dr. Sarah Baechle, Professor of English at the University of Mississippi
The narrative of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale, the story of an Italian nobleman who repeatedly tests his wife’s obedience, so troubles its audience—contemporary and medieval—that readers have long sought ways to justify Walter’s mercurial cruelty towards his wife, Griselde, often interpreting the Tale as a Christian allegory. This talk examines three different ways of reading Walter’s abuse at its narrative culmination, when Griselde is ejected from her marital home and forced to return to her poor father’s house and then summoned again to prepare a marital bed for Walter and his new wife. It considers these two pivotal homecomings as explorations of the power of the English language, of the value of the individual will and the importance of consent, and of the necessity of resisting tyranny—reminding us that the Middle Ages still speaks meaningfully to us today.
Tuesday, April 21
5:30 pm – Science and Math Learning Center Auditorium, SMLC 102
“Constructing Medieval Islamic Patterns: Moroccan Geometry Comes Home”
Lecture by Dr. Jessica Streit, Professor of Art History at the College of Charleston
In Islamic art, geometry takes center stage, adorning objects and buildings both sacred and secular, elite and ordinary. As one might expect, this ubiquitousness has resulted in a robust scholarly literature on Islamic geometry. At the same time, increasing public interest in creating Islamic patterns has inspired contemporary artists and craftspeople to create written and video tutorials. This lecture approaches the construction of medieval Islamic geometry from three complementary perspectives: a scholar, a practitioner, and a teacher. It opens by presenting the methods used by two well-known authors – an American scholar and a British designer – to construct two medieval Moroccan patterns. Significantly, both authors advertise their methods as “universal,” and “traditional.” Then, it compares those methods to one taught by Hamza El Fasiki, a Moroccan craftsman. The clear advantage – and, I will argue – likely historicity of the Moroccan method will become clear, especially when supported by historical objects. I will also suggest that the methods used by the first two authors belies a colonial perspective of the Islamic world, a view that El Fasiki and I share. Finally, I conclude by reflecting on my own practice and teaching of Islamic geometry – a living tradition with local specificities – in our globalized world.
Wednesday, April 22
5:30 pm – Science and Math Learning Center Auditorium, SMLC 102
“Archbishop Wulfstan of York and the Shaping of Early English Society”
Lecture by Dr. Nicholas Schwartz, Professor of English at the University of New Mexico
Thursday, April 23
5:30 pm – Science and Math Learning Center Auditorium, SMLC 102
“Sacred Space, Profane Place: Understanding the Medieval Nature of Home”
Lecture by Dr. Kim Klimek, Professor of History at Metropolitan State University - Denver
Finding home, a place of belonging, of sanctuary, feels modern, but home has a history. This talk focuses on the medieval conception of “home,” to show us that our modern ideals have resonance in a distant past, in places as far away as medieval Japan and as close as the pueblos in New Mexico. Home is a physical space, but it also a concept, a feeling, that encompasses lands, peoples, and the mystical relationship between human and divine. Like the sparrow through the mead hall, we will tour the medieval past, investigating the nature of home and homecoming, to connect ourselves to our medieval ancestors, and to find our way “home” both by looking backwards and moving forward.
The 39th Annual Helen Damico Memorial Lecture Series: The Interconnected Middle Ages
March 31 - April 3, 2025
Full Schedule:
Monday, March 31
5:30 pm – Woodward Hall 101
“James Bond, A Grifter, A Video Avatar, and A Shark Walk into King Arthur’s Court: The Ever-Expanding Canon of Cinema Arthuriana”
Lecture by Kevin J. Harty, Professor of English at LaSalle University
Filmmakers have been in love with the various stories that surround the legend of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table since at least 1904 when Thomas Edison tried (unsuccessfully) to release a film version of Wagner’s opera Parsifal. Since that less than auspicious beginning, films about King Arthur—what I have dubbed cinema Arthuriana—have been released by the hundreds. Some of these films attempt to translate a medieval Arthuriana text to the screen. Others look at later Arthurian texts such as Twain’s Connecticut Yankee or White’s The Once and Future King. Still others just nod in the direction of the story of Arthur, many in unexpected ways. This lecture looks at some of these unexpected cinematic Arthurian nods and the ways in which they speak to the continuing vitality of the Arthurian legend today.
Tuesday, April 1
5:30 pm – Woodward Hall 101
“Apprehending Global Networks in the Fourteenth-Century Bari Inventories”
Lecture by Jill Caskey, Professor in the Department of Visual Studies and the Graduate Department of Art History at the University of Toronto
San Nicola in Bari, Italy, was constructed to hold the remains of St. Nicholas of Myra, the Early Christian bishop who eventually morphed into the figure of Santa Claus. During the later Middle Ages, the saint’s appeal was wide-ranging, inspiring people from England to central Asia to dedicate churches to him, adopt his name, and travel to his shrine in Bari. Three inventories of San Nicola’s treasury survive from the fourteenth century, providing rare and significant evidence of the changing material, visual, and liturgical environment of the church. This lecture focuses on how the authors of the inventories conceptualized the treasury’s contents and perceived their place in the world—including their changing relationships to diverse peoples and sites of artistic production.
Wednesday, April 2
5:30 pm – Woodward Hall 101
“Disability and Life Writing in a Global Middle Ages: Mutual Aid and Collective Care”
Lecture by Jonathan Hsy, Professor of English at George Washington University
How did disabled people travel in the medieval past, and what structures of care and community did they create in the process? This presentation explores first-person accounts of travel by disabled authors throughout medieval Afro-Eurasia, including European religious writers Teresa de Cartagena and Margery Kempe, the intrepid Muslim pilgrim Ibn Battuta, and Chinese literati poets Bai Juyi and Shangguan Wan’er. By considering how authors across a range of medieval contexts write about their experiences of disability, we can gain new understandings of historical modes of mutual and collective care that anticipate core principles of disability activism today.
Thursday, April 3
3:30 pm – Woodward Hall 101
Musical Performance by the UNM Early Music Ensemble in Woodward Hall 101 at 3:30pm.
5:30 pm – Woodward Hall 101
“Marco Polo’s Description of the World and the Diversity of the Global Middle Ages”
Lecture by Sharon Kinoshita, Distinguished Professor of Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz
“Lords, emperor and kings, dukes and marquises, counts, knights and townsfolk, and all of you who wish to know the diverse races of men and the diversities of the diverse regions of the world take this book and have it read to you.” Thus begins the text usually known in modern English translation as “Marco Polo’s Travels.” In my talk, I return this work—composed in 1298 by the Venetian merchant in collaboration with the Arthurian romance writer Rustichello of Pisa—to its original title, The Description of the World (Le Devisement du monde). Through Marco’s eyes and Rustichello’s pen, we will discover not only the interconnectedness of the thirteenth-century world—produced in part by the lightning-quick Mongol conquests of the first half of the century but some of the surprising ways that Marco’s “Description” challenges the received knowledge both of his day and our own.
