Symposium
The Marco Symposium is the Institute’s premier annual event, held every year in the spring semester. The Symposium brings leading experts in their field to the University of Tennessee for two days of talks on that year’s theme, a public keynote by a major distinguished scholar, and concludes with a roundtable discussion by all the participants. Each year the Symposium is led by at least two Marco faculty members from different departments, celebrating our Institute’s interdisciplinarity.
Previous Symposium Themes
- 2026: “The Roland Tradition: From History to Legend, From King Charles to Stephen King”
- 2024/2025: “Local and Global Perspectives on Materiality in the Premodern World”
- 2023: “The Canon of Shakespeare at 400”
- 2022: “Religious Communities Across Space and Time in Africa, Europe, and the Middle East”
- 2020/2021: “Visions of the End: Medieval & Renaissance Apocalyptic Cultures”
- 2019: “Death and Dying in Medieval Judaism, Christianity, and Islam”
- 2018: “Navigating Language in the Early Islamic World”
- 2017: “Carolingian Experiments”
- 2016: “Rome: Beyond the Discourse of Renewal”
- 2015: “‘Cry Havoc!’: War, Diplomacy and Conspiracy in the Middle Ages and Renaissance”
- 2014: “Reconceiving Pre-Modern Spaces”
- 2012: “Grounding the Book: Readers, Writers, and Places in the Pre-Modern World”
- 2011: “Gardens, Real and Imagined”
- 2010: “The Building Blocks of France”
- 2009: “Humanism and Its Economies”
- 2007: “Saints & Citizens: Religion and Politics in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance”
- 2006: “The Book of Travels: Genre, Ethnology, Pilgrimage from 1250-1650”
- 2005: “Interactions and Images: Cultural Contacts Across Eurasia, 600-1600”
- 2004: “Spectacle and Public Performance in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance”
- 2003: “Books and Readers in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance”
- 2002: “Scripture and Pluralism: The Study of the Bible in the Sectarian Worlds of the Middle Ages and Renaissance”