Head of Department, Modern Languages and European Studies.

Teaching

FR1IFC, Introduction to French Culture; FR2SCR French Literature Onscreen; FR3JC Jean Cocteau: Films and Narratives. Contributor to ML2MRL Love in Medieval and Renaissance Literature and ML3CW Cinemas of the World; FR3L6, Part 3 French language.

I am a medievalist specialising in Occitan and French literature, and former Director of the University of Reading's Graduate Centre for Medieval Studies.

I am a former member of the international committee of the 'Association internationale d'études occitanes' (AIEO) www.aieo.org

My PhD was in the satirical tradition of troubadour poetry. My current research focuses on translation and adaptation of Latin didactic texts into the vernacular, as well as on word-and-image relations.   I have published on Old Occitan satirical and moralising verse, Old French lyric poetry (pastourelle and chansons de toile), and Middle French romance and didactic texts. My recent research has been on issues of multilingualism in French, Occitan and Catalan literature, as well as on the vernacular translation and adaptation of Latin didactic texts (e.g. Middle French versions of Valerius Maximus' Facta et dicta memorabilia). My current project, initially funded by the Leverhulme Trust (2011-13) is an edition of the Occitan version of a fourteenth-century universal history told largely through the medium of genealogies and images (British Library Egerton 1500), find out more by visiting the egerton 1500 blog

Postgraduate supervision
I have advised postgraduate research on medieval heresy in the Languedoc, tax records in Occitan-speaking regions, as well as on nineteenth-century Occitan writers.

Enquiries are welcome concerning postgraduate research in any of the following areas: word and image relations in poetry and didactic literature, multilingualism, hybridity, vernacular book cultures, translation, book culture, education, performance, vernacular readers, heresy and authority, adaptation (medieval and modern).

Graduate Centre for Medieval Studies

For details of Reading Medieval Studies click here:

Reading Medieval Studies

 WaysofWarCentre

Authored books

Samson and Delilah in Medieval Insular French Texts and Images: Translation and Adaptation (forthcoming)

 Multilingualism and Mother Tongue in medieval French, Occitan and Catalan narratives. Penn State University Press, 2010. ISBN 978-0-271-03672-4. http://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-03672-4.html

Between Sequence and Sirventes: Aspects of Parody in the Troubadour Lyric (Society for French Studies/ European Humanities Research Board, ‘Legenda’, 2000)

Edited volumes

Edited with Rebecca Rist and Claire Taylor, The Cathars and the Albigensian Crusade: A Sourcebook (London: Routledge, 2013), ISBN 978-1-40-825550-6

Edited with Stephen J. Milner, The Erotics of Consolation: Desire and Distance in the Middle Ages, New Middle Ages series (New York – Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan USA, 2008), viii+ 241 p. ISBN -13: 978-1-4039-7619-2

Authored chapter: ‘Maternal Consolatio in Antoine de La Sale’s Reconfort de Madame de Fresne’ (pp.185-203).

Edited with Marcus Bull, The World of Eleanor of Aquitaine: Literature and Society in Southern France in the eleventh and thirteenth centuries (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2005) (50% editorial work and co-authored introduction)

Edition

Simone de Beauvoir, Les Bouches inutiles: Edition with notes and introduction (Bristol Classical Press/ Duckworth, 2001)

Selected publications before 2007:

• ‘Nourishing lineage in the early French versions of the Romance of Melusine’, Medium Ævum 74.1 (2005) 83-97
• ‘Memory, Teaching, and Performance: The Two Versions of Peire de Corbian’s Thezaur’, in Études de langue et de littérature médiévales offertes à Peter T. Ricketts, edited by Ann Buckley and Dominique Billy (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), pp. 281-92
•  ‘Vernacular Poems and Inquisitors in Languedoc and Champagne, c.1242-1249’, Viator, (Journal of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at UCLA), 33 (2002) 117-32
•  ‘Did Women Perform Satirical Poetry? Trobairitz and Soldaderas in Medieval Occitan Poetry’, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 37 (2001) 15-25
• ‘Tearful Performance: When Troubadours Weep’, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, 51.4 (2000) [2001] 495-504
• ‘Satirical and moralising poetry’, chapter in The Troubadours: An Introduction, edited by Sarah Kay and Simon Gaunt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp.47-65.
•  ‘Myths of exile and the Albigensian Crusade’, New Readings, 4 (1998) 7-22
•  ‘Identifying the toza in Occitan pastorela and Old French pastourelle’, French Studies, 52.2 (1998) 129-41
• ‘Defamation in the Troubadour Sirventes: Legislation and Lyric Poetry’, Medium Ævum, 46 (1997) 28-41
•  ‘Negative self-promotion: the troubadour sirventes joglaresc’, in The Court and Cultural Diversity: Selected Papers from the Eighth Triennial Congress of the International Courtly Literature Society, The Queen’s University of Belfast, 26 July-1 August 1995, edited by Evelyn Mullally and John Thompson (Woodbridge: D.S. Brewer, 1997), pp.47-56
•  ‘A Reading of Troubadour Insult Songs: The Comunals cycle’, Reading Medieval Studies, 22 (1996) 63-84
•  ‘La place du sermon dans le discours satirique de Marcabru’, Actes du IVe Congrès International de l’AIEO, Vitoria-Gasteiz, 22-28 août 1993, 2 volumes, edited by Ricardo Cierbide (Vitoria-Gasteiz: Cierbide, 1995) I, 173-187