Medieval Futures: The Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Binghamton University: 1966–2016

1966: The US war in Vietnam begins to escalate rapidly. To meet the needs of this highly intensive, overseas military engagement, the Selective Service conscripts 343,000 American men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-six into the US army.¹ Until this year, draft boards had generally granted deferments to full-time university students, but now all “underperforming” students are required to pass an exam to avoid being reclassified as draft-eligible.² The antiwar movement consequently becomes more active on university campuses. Antiwar rallies are held in several US cities on March 26, including a large rally in New York City drawing 22,000 participants.³ Martin Luther King Jr. denounces the war in Vietnam.⁴ For the rest of the long decade of the sixties, the war and the student antiwar movements it generated collide—sometimes violently—over conflicting views of the American future.⁵

1966: Aldo Bernardo (1920–2011), Professor of Italian and a founding faculty member of Binghamton University, submits a proposal for an organized research center, the Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies (CEMERS), at the State University of New York at Binghamton. SUNY Binghamton (as it was then known) is at this moment a fledgling “university center,” having just the year before joined Stony Brook, Albany, and Buffalo to become the fourth research university in the newly established and rapidly expanding State University of New York system. Bernardo’s proposal for CEMERS stated that its mission was to foster interdisciplinary research on Medieval and Renaissance Europe and the Mediterranean world, with particular attention on the evolution and interaction of Christian, Islamic, and Jewish cultures and communities.

I have juxtaposed a global picture of 1966 to the highly local event of the founding of CEMERS in that same year in order to contextualize the fiftieth anniversary of CEMERS as an academic unit and the research it continues to organize and disseminate. The establishment of a research center dedicated to the study of the premodern past in a new, public American university in 1966 would appear to operate in an altogether different temporality than the ongoing US war in Southeast Asia. Indeed, in 1966, the study of the Middle Ages might have appeared to offer a serene space in which to explore cultural formations and intercultural exchange free from political conflicts over war and peace, US imperialism, and human rights. But as the war progressed and American causalities mounted, reports of American atrocities also emerged, such as the massacre of hundreds of Vietnamese civilians by US troops at My Lai in 1968.⁶ The notion that there existed a world apart—in the past on one continent or the present on another—became increasingly untenable. Although Vietnam is not mentioned in any of the documents related to the founding of CEMERS, it formed an important co-presence to all university culture of that decade as the antiwar movement brought the war home to university campuses in the late ’60s. The quotidian nature of the student antiwar movement is illustrated by the strike that completely shut down four hundred university campuses—including SUNY Binghamton—after the invasion of Cambodia in the spring of 1970.⁷ In addition to the antiwar movement of the ’60s, there were powerful concurrent movements: the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, and the 1969 Stonewall riots that initiated a new era in LGBT rights. In the decades that followed, these social forces restructured the intellectual life of universities, including the questions we bring to the past. Critical race theory, postcolonial theory, feminist and queer theory—such theoretical formulations have their origins in the social movements of the 1960s. In 1966, the future of Medieval Studies was to become intertwined with “the intellectual and attitudinal substructure provided by what transpired in the 60s,” in the words of Kirkpatrick Sale.⁸ In 2016, we now take for granted that the questions we bring to research on the premodern past are crafted in ways that reflect the urgent questions of our world—both of our present and our future. [End Page...