Located centrally on the campus of Arizona State University, ACMRS is charged with coordinating and stimulating interdisciplinary research about medieval and early modern literature and culture.
1982-87: In establishing ACMRS, ASU employed Professor Fredi Chiappelli, then Director of the UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, as a consultant.
The founding document also included the following provisions: ACMRS was to be located at ASU; a Director with an indefinite term was to be appointed; a Steering Committee composed of three scholars from each university was to be appointed and would serve on a rotating basis; subsequent members of the Steering Committee were to be nominated by the standing Steering Committee and appointed by the Vice President for Academic Affairs at ASU; each university was to contribute one visiting professor per year who was to visit the other two campuses; four Research Assistants (RAs) were to be funded at each university per year to assist faculty members in their research.
At ASU, ACMRS was given regular personnel and operations budgets, covering staff, printing, mailing, and other administrative costs, and was placed in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (CLAS).
In response to that request, the Director gave up her summer salary, eliminated the post-doctoral fellowship, further reduced operating expenses, and cut funds for the Visiting Distinguished Professor line in half.
Since his appointment, in addition to continuing programs already established such as an ad hoc lecture series, a graduate student travel award to the Medieval Congress at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, and a book award for promising undergraduates intending to do post-graduate work in medieval or Renaissance studies, Bjork instituted over twenty programs or initiatives that changed the structure of ACMRS, lent it more national and international prominence, and reinvigorated cooperation among Arizona's three universities.
Another was to create bylaws (Appendix 2) for the unit, which, among other things, changed the term of appointment for the Director from unlimited to up to five years with extensions possible at the discretion of the Dean and University President.
Grant writing both externally and internally, for example, increased to an average of 16 proposals per year; and manuscript submissions to the MRTS series continued to flow in.
2002-7: During the period of the current fine-year review, Bjork was on research leave for two years (2003-4 at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and 2006-7 on an NEH Fellowship), but ACMRS continued to rise in prominence globally.
To foster even better relationships with UA and NAU, in 2005/6, ACMRS held three fall receptions, the usual one in Bjork’s home in Scottsdale and one each in Tucson and Flagstaff.
Also in 2005/6 in order to increase its own fund-raising efforts and support those of others on campus, ACMRS began offering its annual Distinguished Lecture in Medieval Studies during Homecoming week in collaboration with other departments.
[1] Initially, the Center brought one eminent scholar to ASU for a few days to present a public lecture, interact with upper-division and/or graduate classes, and meet informally with students and faculty.
The Distinguished Lecture series was reimagined in 2018 to support the mission of developing public-facing humanities programs that make premodern studies relevant to a contemporary, non-academic audience.
In January of 2018, ACMRS hosted Peter Sellars for an evening dialogue entitled "Engaging the Past to Create the Avant Garde."
RaceB4Race is an ongoing conference series and professional network community by and for scholars of color working on issues of race in premodern literature, history and culture.
RaceB4Race centers the expertise, perspectives, and sociopolitical interests of BIPOC scholars, whose work seeks to expand critical race theory.
Bridging many traditional disciplinary divides, RaceB4Race not only creates innovative scholarly dialogues, but also fosters social change within premodern studies as a whole.
The inaugural RaceB4Race conference emerged as a collaboration between the Medievalists of Color (MOC) and the ShakeRace (Shakespeare and Race) community, groups that were both seeking to push their fields in new archival, theoretical, methodological, pedagogical and practical directions.
In the end, the inaugural RaceB4Race event demonstrated to the world how our understandings of periodization, historicity and even academic disciplines can become more expansive once race is acknowledged as a viable lens of investigation.
ACMRS offers a travel award to a graduate student to present a paper at the International Medieval Congress, held every May at the Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo.
It publishes interpretive and historiographical essays that explore the ramifications of current scholarship or that treat issues and themes of interest to any historian of the pre-modern period.
In the Spring of 2004, ACMRS received a unique medieval statue as a donation from the Metropolitan Museum of Art docent, Jeri Garbaccio and her husband Charles.
The medieval figure is a three-foot wood polychromy seated king of Spanish origin, dating back to the second half of the thirteenth century.