Dr K. Travers
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Contact details |
| Email: Katherine.Travers@warwick.ac.uk |
| Room: R3.17 (Ramphal Building) |
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Office hours: Not Currently Teaching |
Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow
Qualifications
M.A., M.Phil., Ph.D.
About
My work primarily focuses on literatures in Italian and Occitan. I am interested in what medieval literatures and book cultures can tell us about broader political questions. My 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.
My work has appeared in The Italianist, NeMLA Italian Studies, and other venues. I also act as an Assistant Editor for gender/sexuality/italy. I am currently finishing my first book project, that investigates how gender operates within Italy’s medieval poetry books.
Previously, I held the position of Powys Roberts Postdoctoral Fellow in Modern Languages at St Hugh’s College, University of Oxford. I completed my PhD at New York University (NYU), and taught both at NYU and at Durham University.
While at Warwick, I will be developing my 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 my study of medieval plurilingualism and the meanings of “Italy” in the Middle Ages.
Pronouns: (they/she)
Research and Teaching Interests
I welcome enquiries from students interested in the history of gender and sexuality, lyric poetry, lyric theory, Dante, Petrarch, and medieval culture.
Selected Publications
"Perpetual Return: What a Fascist Reading of Dante Tells Us About Philology". Centre for Intellectual History Blog, University of Oxford. August 1, 2024. Read the blogpost here.
“‘Facce a parlar pronte’: Speaking Women in Vita nuova 18-19 and Occitan Songbook Vatican Latin 3207 (H)”, NeMLA Italian Studies, XLIII (2021): 123-141.
“‘Sono Masochista?’: Patrizia Valduga and the Poetics of Masochism”, The Italianist 40, no.1 (2020): 103-121.