DENTON (UNT), Texas -- Dr. Mickey Abel, associate professor in the Department of Art Education and Art History at the University of North Texas, was named the president of the Texas Medieval Association for 2014. She received her title after 19 years of involvement.

TEMA holds an interdisciplinary regional conference annually that is hosted at different universities around the state. The first TEMA conference was held at UNT 25 years ago, and in October 2014, TEMA will return to UNT under the leadership of Abel, the first art historian to spearhead the conference. Dr. Barbara Rosenwein, a historian from the Loyola University in Chicago will deliver the keynote address for the conference.

“The conference is typically led by a historian, so this will be a good opportunity to get art historians on the map,” Abel said. “This will highlight the variety of medievalists here at UNT.”

The 2014 conference will be three days rather than the typical two because it will also incorporate conference events for the North Texas Medieval Graduate Student Symposium, an annual conference that Abel helped to create that connects medievalists of multiple disciplines in the North Texas region. This year, the conference will have a session featuring work by students in the UNT Honors College, making it the first year that undergraduates have been able to include their work in the TEMA conference and North Texas Medieval Graduate Student Symposium.

The conference welcomes scholarly medievalists of any field to attend the event. Also at the conference, the Department of English will host a performance of Beowulf, and the College of Music will perform two medieval pieces. Faculty from the history department, foreign language department philosophy and religion department and the art history department will participate in the conference.

 “This is a fabulous opportunity to showcase the strength of our programs and the work that faculty across the university do that deals with medieval art and culture, and it is thanks to the incredibly hard work of Dr. Abel that this conference is going to happen here at the University of North Texas,” said Dr. Denise Baxter, chair of the Department of Art Education and Art History.