Current Academic Activities
My research offers a linguistic and philological approach of literary issues such as the origins and evolution of medieval literary genres, the expression of narrative voice and point of view, the relationship between history and fiction, medieval intertextuality and intratextuality, and gendered discourse strategies in medieval narratives.
My first book Narrateur et point de vue dans la littérature française médiévale : Une approche linguistique (Peter Lang, 1998) focuses on storytelling in the French Middle Ages and my second book Speech and Thought in French: Conceptss and Strategies (John Benjamins, 2005) studies reported discourse in medieval literary texts as well as in contemporary oral narratives, press and literature.
My following project entitled Quoting her: Discourse, Gender, and Genre in Medieval French Short Narratives and funded through a British Academy research grant proposed a fresh interdisciplinary approach to examine how female characters' discourse is framed and how it is expressed in a corpus of lais and fabliaux ranging from the 12th to the 14th c. I explored female expression differs between these two literary genres in relation to the specific ideologies that underlie each of them.
I am currently co-leading a joint interdisciplinary research project on the 13th c. narrative poem La Chastelaine de Vergy, envisaged as a 'crucible' for medieval French literature. The project aims at (re)-positioning and contextualising the Chastelaine materially, intertextually, geographically and chronologically, thereby offering new methodological approaches to medieval literary and cultural ecosystem(s).
I lecture on topics ranging from Women and Medieval French Literature to Writing History in the Middle Ages and to set texts such as La Chanson de Roland, Béroul’s Tristan and Villon’s Testament. I also teach History of the French language.
I am a founding and executive member of Ci-dit, an international research group on reported discourse. I am also a member of the interdisciplinary research network: ‘Voices in Medieval French Narrative (12th c. to 15th c.)’, funded by the British Academy. I have been invited by Professor Marion Uhlig of Fribourg University (Switzerland) to join her new research project on Medieval Metalepses, which has been awarded a £800K grant by the Fonds national suisse de la recherche scientifique.
Current Positions:
- Professor of Medieval French Studies,
University of Oxford
- Fellow of Balliol College
Fields of Study:
- Medieval French Language & Literature,
- History of the French Language,
- Linguistics and Philology,
- Discourse Analysis
Education:
- Licence en Philologie Romane,
Université Libre de Bruxelles, 1991
- Ph. D. in French Linguistics,
University of California at Berkeley, 1996
Previous Posts:
- Teaching Fellow,
University of St. Andrews, 1996-7
- Research Fellow,
Gonville & Caius College,
University of Cambridge, 1997-2001
- Zaharoff Fellow in French Linguistics,
University of Oxford, 2001-2003
- Visiting Fellow, Council of the Humanities,
Princeton University 2013
- Co-editor of French Studies 2012-2015
- Director of Oxford Medieval Studies
Programme 2015-2017
- Chair of the Sub-Faculty of French,
2016-2018
- Proctor of the University of Oxford
2019-2020
Links
• Voices in Medieval French Narrative
• Oxford Medieval Studies Programme
