I recently became reacquainted with Dr. Gerry Heng, one of my professors at the University of Texas at Austin, and was fascinated to learn she’s morphed our graduate global medieval studies course into a full-fledge cross-disciplinary collaboration known as SCGMA, or the Scholarly Community for the Globalization of the MIddle Ages.

According to the collaboration’s website-- Under the leadership of Dr. Susan Noakes, former Center director, CMS has partnered with the Medieval Studies Program at the University of Texas to organize the scholarly community for the globalization of the "Middle Ages," an outgrowth of the highly successful "Global Interconnections, 500-1500 C.E." course originated by Geraldine Heng, Director of the program at Texas. For a description of the course see their website. This community seeks to reconceive the field of Medieval Studies not in terms of Europe alone but also in relation to Africa, the Middle East, Eurasia, and Asia. The Graduate School funded a planning workshop in November 2007.

Be sure to check out the initiative which is building the MappaMundi. “In its fully mature form, mappamundi will take an avatar—a 21st century ibn battuta or marco polo—for a walk around the world on a medieval world map.”

Below, I’ve pasted an image of from their site--the Catalan Atlas of 1375, which is held by the Bibliothèque nationale de France.