MEMSA

Medieval and Early Modern Student Association

To be added to the MEMSA email announcement list, please write to To be added to the MEMSA email announcement list, please write to memsa.ucla@gmail.com.

CMRS-CEGS provides support for MEMSA, an interdisciplinary student organization that aims to foster connections and community among diverse graduate students from various departments and programs (including Asian Languages and Cultures, African Studies, American Indian Studies, Latin American Studies, Spanish, Gender Studies, Comparative Literature, Linguistics, English, etc.) studying topics from late antiquity through the end of the seventeenth century. MEMSA annually hosts panels and workshops on professional development, scholarly topics, and research methods. Importantly, MEMSA also organizes extracurricular activities for its graduate students, including social events and group museum visits. Together with CMRS-CEGS, MEMSA organizes a yearly student conference, with the next conference in the works for Spring Quarter 2025. MEMSA’s mission as an organization is to provide a space to support students’ professional and personal well-being.

Contact memsa.ucla@gmail.com to be added to the mailing list and receive regular newsletters. MEMSA looks forward to hearing from you!

MEMSA Officers Mission Statement 2024-2025

We, the 2024-2025 MEMSA officers (Chase Caldwell Smith, Sofía Yazpik, Miranda Heaner, and Stanley Wu), aspire to make MEMSA a welcoming, supportive, and useful community to medievalists and early modernists from a diverse group of departments and fields, especially those beyond the traditional medieval-Renaissance European axis. As such, we will promote and highlight diversity, equity, and inclusion in medieval studies and early modern studies. MEMSA will serve as a bridge between graduate students and the CMRS Center for Early Global Studies, and advocate on behalf of students with CMRS-CEGS and other relevant institutions on campus. MEMSA will provide community, support, and enrichment to graduate students’ social and intellectual lives at UCLA.

‘Community’ in particular is a key idea for us. We want to emphasize that we wish to include all who engage with the global medieval and early modern eras at UCLA by fostering more interdepartmental communication and bringing together students who might not otherwise have many opportunities to interact due to departmental siloing. We plan to facilitate social and intellectual engagement between medievalist and early modernist graduate students from diverse fields by providing opportunities to discuss their work, debate key issues related to medieval and early modern studies, cultivate professional academic skills, and develop a sense of community. Our plans include:

• • Continuing the tradition of the Annual MEMSA graduate student conference in the spring quarter, which will focus on a broad theme of interest to medievalists and early modernists.
  • Highlighting and promoting events, exhibitions, and lectures happening on campus and in the LA area of relevance to students of medieval and early modern studies
  • Providing opportunities for graduate students to share their research in a welcoming environment via informal work-in-progress sessions.
  • Organizing professionalizing workshops. Possibilities include job application workshops, grant application workshops, mock job talks, and presentations from recent alumni about their experiences, whether academic, academic adjacent, or beyond academia.
  • Setting up collaborative workshops, group discussions, or reading groups centered around topics of interest. These might include decoloniality in medieval and early modern studies, the global Middle Ages and early modern world, pre-modern race, or justice and the academy.
  • Hosting informal social events to help develop connections among students.
  • Bringing together students for informal studying roundtables at the Royce Hall Reading Room to develop collegiality and promote the use of this space for CEGS-CMRS members.
  • Coordinating visits to relevant museum exhibitions and special collections departments at UCLA and in the LA area

We look forward to incorporating a larger group of student voices as MEMSA continues to expand under the aegis of CMRS-CEGS.

Chase Caldwell Smith
Sofía Yazpik
Miranda Heaner
Stanley Wu

MEMSA Officers 2024-2025

September 13, 2024 MEMSA Conference
Thinking With Materiality in the Early Global World

June 2, 2023 MEMSA Conference
Frontiers, Borders, & Borderlands in the Early Modern World

May 20-21, 2022 MEMSA Conference
“Intersectionality in the Early Global World”

May 27, 2021 MEMSA Conference
“Resilience, Resistance, and Renewal in the Medieval and Early Modern World”