About Medieval and Early Modern Studies at Carolina

Founded with the generous support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Program in MEMS at UNC–Chapel Hill supports scholarly work that includes and expands the traditional focus of Medieval and Early Modern studies. Of particular interest are cultural contacts and exchanges within and beyond Europe, to Byzantine and Islamic lands, to Africa, China, Southeast Asia, and Japan, and to the New World of the Caribbean and the Americas.

MEMS thereby offers a global approach to Medieval and Early Modern studies, one that highlights the profound impact of intellectual, cultural, and economic commerce both within and beyond the traditional borders of the European world. In their teaching and research, Carolina faculty recognize medieval and early modern culture to be defined in large measure by that culture’s tendency to explore, analyze, and incorporate ideas and influences from other cultures—from Ancient Israel, Greece, and Rome, but also from the Byzantine and Islamic lands, to China and Japan in the far East, to the northern and western reaches of Europe (Iceland, Russia, Ireland), to the Caribbean, Latin American, and North American territories of the New World.

Currently, more than 60 faculty members across 10 departments in the humanities and fine arts teach and conduct research about the period, which stretches in its European context from the fall of the Roman Empire through the eighteenth century. Their work spans an impressively broad historical and geographical spectrum, ranging from late antiquity through the end of the seventeenth century and from Christian, Jewish and Islamic cultures of the Middle Ages, to northern Germanic, Nordic, and Celtic art and culture, to the intellectual and economic commerce between Europe and Africa, the Far East, and the New World. In addition to expanding the traditional geographical boundaries of Medieval and Early Modern studies, the MEMS program at Carolina is especially rich in faculty and resources devoted to the cultural transmission and translation of texts and ideas across both time and space. The MEMS program thus gives our existing strengths in medieval and early modern studies a new impetus and global reach.

MEMS has an ongoing collaborative relationship with the Centre for Late Antique & Medieval Studies (CLAMS) at King's College London.