Project team
Simon Gaunt (Principal Investigator; Department of French, King's College London)
Simon Gaunt is Professor of French Language and Literature at King's College London. He has published widely on Old French and medieval Occitan literature, his most recent books being Marco Polo's 'Le Devisement du Monde': Narrative Voice, Language and Diversity (Boydell and Brewer, 2013), Love and Death in Medieval French and Occitan Courtly Literature (OUP, 2006) and The Cambridge Companion to Medieval French Literature (CUP, 2008), which he edited with Sarah Kay. For more information, see http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/depts/french/people/academic/gaunt/index.aspx.
Bill Burgwinkle (Co-Investigator; Department of French, Cambridge University)
Bill Burgwinkle is Professor in Old French and Occitan at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of King's College, Cambridge. His research interests include literary relations in the Mediterranean (French, Occitan, Catalan, Italian), representations of sexuality and the sacred, the spread and intellectual framework of troubadour poetry, and the use of critical theory in Medieval Studies. He has published several books, including The Cambridge History of French Literature (ed.), Sanctity and Pornography in medieval culture; Sodomy, Masculinity and Law in Medieval Literature, Love for Sale and Razos and Troubadour Songs and is currently supervising doctoral theses on the abject and sublime in Occitan saints' lives, space and gender in the Vulgate cycle, and the status of science and magic in twelfth-century romance and theology/philosophy. For more information, see http://www.mml.cam.ac.uk/french/staff/web25/.
Jane Gilbert (Co-Investigator; Department of French, University College London)
Jane Gilbert is Senior Lecturer in French in the School of European Languages, Culture and Society at University College London (UCL). She has published on Old French and Middle English literature both separately and comparatively, including a recent monograph, Living Death in Medieval French and English Literature (CUP, 2011). Her recent articles include 'The Chanson de Roland' in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval French Literature, ed. by Simon Gaunt and Sarah Kay (CUP, 2008) and 'Arthurian Ethics' in The Cambridge Companion to the Arthurian Legend, ed. by Elizabeth Archibald and Ad Putter (CUP, 2009). Of particular relevance to the MFLCOF project, she has contributed an article on Valenciennes and Hainault to David Wallace's major project, Europe: A Literary History, 1348-1418 (OUP, forthcoming 2015; see also the interactive website). For more information, see http://www.ucl.ac.uk/selcs/people/french-staff/jane-gilbert.
Paul Vetch (Co-Investigator, to 2014; Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London)
Prior to taking up a position at Torchbox in 2014, Paul Vetch was Senior Lecturer and King's Business Innovation Fellow at the Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London. Paul's research interests lie in web interfaces and UI conventions, particularly within the Digital Humanities and cultural heritage, and his focus is on process, user engagement, and experimental design and development.
Charlotte Tupman (Co-Investigator, 2014-15; Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London)
Charlotte Tupman is a researcher in digital history, cultural heritage and textual scholarship. She works on the digital publication of ancient, medieval and modern source materials, exploring how we can open up our data in meaningful ways. Her recent projects include Mapping the Medieval Countryside: Inquisitions Post Mortem and Sharing Ancient Wisdoms. For more information, see http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/depts/ddh/people/research/tupman/index.aspx.
Dirk Schoenaers (Postdoctoral Research Associate; Department of French, University College London)
Dirk Schoenaers wrote his PhD at the University of Liverpool, School of Cultures, Languages and Area Studies (July 2010) on Gerard Potter's Middle Dutch translation of Froissart's Chroniques (to appear in Rodopi's Approaches to Translation Studies series). He has published on medieval Dutch historiography (Jan van Boendale's Brabantsche yeesten; Lodewijk van Velthem's Voortzetting van de Spieghel historiael), medieval and early modern aristocratic book collections (together with Hanno Wijsman) and the illustrative programmes of Froissart's chronicle (full text available: here). He also did editorial work on the Online Froissart Project (Sheffield/Liverpool). His research interests include manuscript studies (especially the peritext of the medieval manuscript), the relation between text and image, the dynamics of texts in transition, the linguistic consequences of dynastic change and translation and conflict. In 2013, he joined the editorial staff of Queeste. Journal of Medieval Literature in the Low Countries. After the Medieval Francophone project, Schoenaers moved on to a short-term research fellowship (February-July 2015) at the School of History, University of St. Andrews to investigate the perception of revolt in the historiography of the Burgundian Low Countries. He is also the principal editor for the medieval section of the first 'History of Translation in the Low Countries' (joint project with Theo Hermans, UCL, Cees Koster and Ton Naaijkens, both Universiteit Utrecht).
Nicola Morato (Postdoctoral Research Associate, 2011-2013; Department of French, University of Cambridge)
Nicola Morato (laurea, Università di Padua, Stilistica e metrica italiana, thesis dir. Prof M. Praloran; PhD, European Doctoral School in Romance Philology, thesis dir. Prof L. Leonardi) has pursued his interest in chivalric literary traditions between France and Italy from the 13th to the 16th centuries across several countries. He has received research grants to carry out work at the Sorbonne-Université of Paris IV (2008-9) as well as the Università di Siena (2009-11); he spent a year as Visiting Scholar at Columbia University in New York (2010-11). In October 2013 he took up the post of professeur - chargé de cours in Medieval French Literature at the Université de Liège. He is a member of the Governing Board of the Fondazione Ezio Franceschini - Archivio Gianfranco Contini (Florence) and of the Advisory Board of the journal Le Moyen Âge. Among his publications, Il ciclo di Guiron le Courtois. Strutture e testi nella tradizione manoscritta. Florence: Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2010. His current activities can be found on his page at the Département Transitions.
Huw Grange (Postdoctoral Research Associate, 2014-15; Department of French, University of Cambridge)
Huw Grange completed his doctoral thesis, which explored notions of holiness and monstrosity in medieval French and Occitan saints' lives, at the University of Cambridge in 2012 (see http://www.huwgrange.co.uk). Following a Teaching Fellowship at the University of Oxford (2011-12), he worked as a Research Associate on the University of Kent's Elucidarium Project (2012-14), investigating the manuscript transmission of the vernacular Elucidarium in medieval England. His recent articles have focused on hagiography, vernacular theology, and troubadour song.
David Murray (Project PhD Student; King's College London)
David Muray took his BA (Hons) in Modern and Medieval Languages (French and German) at Homerton College, Cambridge, where he also studied for an MPhil in European Literature and Culture. Having worked largely as a Germanist until this year, his MPhil thesis examined the function of the intercalated texts in Ulrich von Liechtenstein’s Frauendienst. Other substantial work has considered the form of Dante's Vita Nova and also the Guillaume d'Orange cycle of epics. David's current work, supervised by Simon Gaunt, investigates the mobillity of lyrics in medieval Europe, both in terms of translations, multilingualism, and contrafacta.
Neil Jakeman (Research Developer; Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London)
Neil Jakeman originally studied Geology in Cardiff before working in a variety of IT settings as well as a stint as a primary school teacher. He studied GIS and Environmental Management and rediscovered an interest maps of all types, completing a dissertation in the use of GIS for landscape quality assessment. This led to work on historical map archives for an environmental consultancy specialising in contaminated land assessment and then to a web mapping company developing bespoke GIS solutions where he developed an interest in leveraging the muscle of spatial databases to provide flexible and powerful interfaces for web mapping applications. For more information, see http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/depts/ddh/people/research/jakeman/index.aspx.
Ginestra Ferraro (Front-end Developer; Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London)
Ginestra Ferraro studied Graphic Design at IED Milan. While working as an Art Director in few Advertising Companies in Italy, such as TBWA Italia and Factory Group, she developed an interest in web technologies. The transition from traditional to digital design took some learning of PHP, HTML and CSS and led Ginestra to become a freelance Creative Designer, mixing her design knowledge with some coding. She is now a Web Designer / Front-end Developer with over ten years experience in the field. Her interests focus mainly on data visualisations, video interaction with HTML5 and responsive web design. For more information, see http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/depts/ddh/people/research/ferraro/index.aspx.