Liberal Arts department welcomes new Research Fellow Dr Katherine Travers
Dr Katherine (Kate) Travers has recently joined the Liberal Arts department at the University of Warwick as a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow.
Dr Travers previously held the position of Powys Roberts Postdoctoral Fellow in Modern Languages at St Hugh’s College at the University of Oxford. They completed their PhD at New York University (NYU), and previously taught both at NYU and at Durham University.
Their work primarily focuses on literatures in Italian, Occitan, and French, and are interested in what medieval literatures and book cultures can tell us about broader political questions. Their research investigates the material, cultural, and political structures that condition the expression of the first person, or the literary “self’, in medieval Italian literary culture, with a focus on lyric poetry.
Kate’s work has appeared inThe Italianist,NeMLA Italian Studies, and other venues. They also act as an Assistant Editor forgender/sexuality/italy. They are currently finishing their first book project, that investigates how gender operates within Italy’s medieval poetry books.
While at Warwick, Kate will be developing their research project entitled “Fantasies of Empire in Medieval Italy”, mentored by Dr. Bryan Brazeau. The project interrogates how imagery and fantasies of empire interact with literary understanding of the “self” and belonging in the late-thirteenth and early fourteenth-centuries. This project continues Kate’s study of medieval plurilingualism and the meanings of “Italy” in the Middle Ages. The project plans to trace the imaginary of empire in the Veneto and Tuscany by examining the vernacular literatures of the Veneto, Dante’s Monarchia, and Petrarch’s Triumphi and letters.
Kate welcomes enquiries from students in the Liberal Arts department and the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance, where they are also affiliated, particularly those interested in the history of gender and sexuality, lyric poetry, lyric theory, Dante, Petrarch, and medieval culture.
They will be stationed in R3.34 in the Ramphal Building, so we encourage staff and students to ensure that they are given a warm welcome!