Notes on the Contributors

Philippa Byrne is Departmental Lecturer in Medieval History at Somerville College, Oxford. Her research focuses on scholastic thought in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the growth of schools and universities, and the translation of texts between Latin, Greek, and Arabic.

Nicolò Crisafi is Research and Teaching Fellow in Italian and Director of Studies in Modern Languages at Pembroke College, University of Cambridge. He researches medieval Italian literature, with a special focus on Dante. His interests lie in narrative theory, the role of the reader(s), the relation between language and affect, and the intersection between narrative forms and worldviews. He is the author of Dante’s Masterplot and Alternative Narratives in the ‘Commedia’ (Oxford University Press, 2022).

Francesco Giusti is Career Development Fellow and Tutor in Italian at Christ Church, Oxford. He has published two books devoted respectively to the ethics and poetics of mourning and to creative and cognitive desire in lyric poetry: Canzonieri in morte: Per un’etica poetica del lutto (2015) and Il desiderio della lirica: Poesia, creazione, conoscenza (2016). He has co-edited, with Christine Ott and Damiano Frasca, the volume Poesia e nuovi media (2018); with Benjamin Lewis Robinson, The Work of World Literature (2021); and with Adele Bardazzi and Emanuela Tandello, the forthcoming A Gaping Wound: Mourning in Italian Poetry (2022).

Manuele Gragnolati is Professor of Medieval Italian Literature at Sorbonne Université, Associate Director of the ICI Berlin, and Senior Research Fellow at Somerville College, Oxford. His publications include the monographs Experiencing the Afterlife: Soul and Body and Medieval Culture (2005), Amor che move: Linguaggio del corpo e forma del desiderio in Dante, Pasolini e Morante (2013), and Possibilities of Lyric: Reading Petrarch in Dialogue (2020, with Francesca Southerden).

Oren Margolis is a scholar of the Renaissance. A historian of humanism, of history-writing and antiquarianism, and of the art and culture of the book, his interests range from epigraphy to Erasmus, and span Italy and the North, literary, intellectual, and art history. He is the author of The Politics of Culture in Quattrocento Europe: René of Anjou in Italy (Oxford University Press, 2016). Curator of the Bodleian Library exhibition ‘Aldus Manutius: The Struggle and the Dream’ (2015), he is now completing a book on the celebrated scholar-printer of Venice. Since 2019, he has been Lecturer in Renaissance Studies at the University of East Anglia.

Alastair Matthews is a translator and editor in Dunfermline, Scotland. Before leaving academia, he published monographs on the Kaiserchronik (Oxford University Press, 2012) and on the Middle High German Lohengrin (Camden House, 2016). He continues to pursue his scholarly interests, in particular the interface between German and Scandinavian literary history in the Middle Ages.

Brian McMahon is Associate Lecturer in English at Oxford Brookes University, co-convenor of the ‘Old Norse Poetry in Performance’ research project, and co-editor of Old Norse Poetry in Performance (forthcoming).

Monika Otter is an Associate Professor of English at Dartmouth College. Her research focuses on Latin, French, and English literature from England and northern France, 11th–13th centuries. She has worked on historiography, saints’ lives, romance, and the complicated interfaces between these genres; the development of ‘fiction’ as an idea and as a category of literature; women’s literature and gender issues; and translation theory. Her publications include The Book of Encouragement and Comfort: Goscelin’s Letter to the Recluse Eva (Boydell and Brewer, 2004); Inventiones: Fiction and Referentiality in Twelfth-Century English Historical Writing (North Carolina University Press, 1996).

Damiano Sacco was a Fellow at the ICI Berlin from 2018 to 2020. His work focuses on continental and Italian philosophy, in particular on the works of Martin Heidegger, Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Derrida, and Emanuele Severino. He is currently translating some of Emanuele Severino’s most important works into English. His articles have appeared in, among others, Continental Philosophy Review, diacritics, and The European Legacy.

Francesca Southerden is Associate Professor of Medieval Italian at the University of Oxford and Fellow of Somerville College. Her recent publications include Possibilities of Lyric: Reading Petrarch in Dialogue (2020, with Manuele Gragnolati) and The Oxford Handbook of Dante (2021, co-edited with Manuele Gragnolati and Elena Lombardi). She has a book forthcoming entitled Dante and Petrarch in the Garden of Language.

Almut Suerbaum is Fellow and Tutor in German at Somerville College, Oxford, and currently Chair of the Faculty Board of Medieval and Modern Languages. She has published extensively on the interrelationship between vernacular literature and Latin learned culture. As co-founder of the Somerville Medievalist Research Group, she has co-edited the volumes Aspects of the Performative in Medieval Culture (2010), Polemic: Language as Violence in Medieval and Early Modern Discourse (2015), and Medieval Temporalities: The Experience of Time in Medieval Europe (2020).

Annie Sutherland is Tutorial Fellow in Old and Middle English at Somerville College, Oxford, and Associate Professor in the English Faculty. She has published widely on medieval devotional literature and is currently working on thirteenth-century anchoritic culture.

Benjamin Thompson is Tutor in Medieval History at Somerville College and currently Associate Head (Education) of the Humanities Division in the University of Oxford. His work probes the interface between the medieval Church’s core mission of prayer and ministry and its social and political presence. He has contributed to the previous Somerville medievalists’ volumes and is currently writing a book about the nationalization and dissolution of the ‘alien’ (foreign) priories in late medieval England.

Edmund Wareham is a former Postdoctoral Research Associate on the ‘Nuns’ Network’ project and a Fulford Non-Stipendiary Junior Research Fellow at Somerville College. He is now a Departmental Lecturer in Early Modern European Social and Cultural History at Oxford’s History Faculty, and Director of Studies in History at St Benet’s Hall.

Johannes Wolf is an independent researcher who has taught widely on Old and Middle English literature and specializes in Middle English religious writing. His Cambridge University PhD focused on the disciplinary techniques of pastoral and confessional material in Middle English. More recently, his research has turned to questions of experience, affect, and representations of the non-human in devotional medieval literature.