In August 2022, the community gathered to celebrate the career of Maura Lafferty after her retirement over the summer.
Professor Lafferty started the program in medieval Latin at UT, which was fundamental to the growth in medieval studies on the Knoxville campus. The contributions of Professor Lafferty to the Marco Institute have included the formation of a legendary series of seminars on codicology and paleography, offering important training to many cohorts of graduate students. Jay Rubenstein, a former Riggsby Director of the Marco Institute, wrote in with the following words of praise: “I admire immensely Professor Lafferty’s humanity, her linguistic skills, and her rigor. I have been blessed with a lot of different professional opportunities in my life, but the chance to learn from Professor Lafferty is right up there near the top.” In addition, Thomas Burman, another former Riggsby Director, reflected that “Professor Lafferty is remarkable for her fascination with the big questions that knowledge of Latin and paleography could open up. All this she got across vividly to our students, who came away from the paleography course with the knowledge that there are piles and piles of Latin manuscripts out there and each one has a story to tell.”
It is with pride that we reflect upon Professor Lafferty’s contributions to the Marco Institute over the years. It is also hard to imagine the Marco Institute without her daily presence on campus, since she was hired in 2006 as we first ushered forth the Graduate Certificate program to encourage interdisciplinary training in Medieval Studies for which she played such a leading role. She is the author of Walter of Châtillon’s “Alexandreis”: Epic and the Problem of Historical Understanding (Turnhout, 1998) and important articles in the Journal of Early Christian Studies, the Journal of Medieval Latin, and Sacris erudiri. We are pleased that Professor Lafferty remains in Knoxville and continues to convene the Latin sight-reading group attended not just by current faculty and students, but some of her former students and alumni as well.