This symposium contributed to a burgeoning body of scholarship on the meaning of the “medieval” and “Middle Ages” in increasingly interdisciplinary and cross-regional conceptions of the premodern world. The symposium contributed to current scholarship by demonstrating that Europe was not necessarily at the center of the global Middle Ages and, especially, by offering new perspectives from other areas of the world. This symposium both complemented and departed from recent attempts to diversify approaches to the medieval. Initiatives such as the Global Middle Ages Project (UT Austin) and the journal The Medieval Globe (Arc Humanities Press) give evidence of the growing interest in and demand for a more global view of this period of history. However, current critical analyses of human differences and global connectivity within “the global Middle Ages” (e.g. by Geraldine Heng and Dorothy Kim) still retain a substantively Eurocentric focus. What work does the idea of “the medieval” do, and for whom? What do we gain and what do we lose by insisting on a shared notion of the medieval? What do we gain and lose by conceiving of a more diverse Middle Ages characterized by mobility and connectedness rather than isolation and limited travel? This symposium considered what the “medieval” means for various geographic regions, such as the Americas, Africa, and Asia, in hopes of facilitating a dramatic shift in our scholarly visions of what it means to do medieval history, and global history more generally. The symposium brought together a number of existing forums for scholarship on the premodern, such as the Program in Medieval and Early Modern Studies, the Michigan Medieval Seminar, the Forum for Research on Medieval Studies, the Early Modern Colloquium, and the editorial board of Fragments: Comparative Studies in Ancient and Medieval Pasts, as well as collaborate with the Global Middle Ages Project, presently one of the most prominent advocates for globalized view of medieval studies.