Biography
James Powers' current scholarship in progress is on the topic of municipal and middle class dueling. Powers is actively pursuing the depiction of medieval military arms, armor and equipment from surviving European artistic sources. This line of research led to Powers being accepted as a Member of the Institute for Advanced Research at Princeton University for the spring term of 1998, for which he was granted a Faculty Fellowship. Powers' topic was the Militarization of Ecclesiastical Art in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries. Pursuant to the follow-up for that research, Powers has done photographic research in Portugal, Spain and France, in connection with conference presentations offered in Portugal and Spain. He has also constructed an Access database consisting of his thousands of pictorial examples and their respective descriptive details to assist in the control of his materials, as well as to create statistical tables to account for their respective density of distribution in the Western European countries.