Giulia Boitani

Giulia is a College Teaching Officer in Modern Languages at King’s. She grew up in Rome, Italy, where she studied Romance Philology and Literature at University of Rome ‘La Sapienza’ as an undergraduate and as a Masters student. Throughout both degrees, she specialised in Medieval Occitan troubadour lyric. She first came to Cambridge and the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics with the Erasmus+ programme and stayed through to her PhD in Medieval French at Pembroke College. She worked as a teacher and researcher in Paris and Rome and was the recipient of the French Studies Postdoctoral Fellowship, which she held in Cambridge. She has been at King’s since 2021.

Giulia is a medieval literary scholar whose interests span medieval Romance literature, particularly medieval French, Occitan, and Italian. She is especially interested in looking at how different manuscript and cultural contexts (especially from the 14th and 15th centuries) shape a medieval text and the ideologies it carries. She has recently published on the form History and its narration takes in a very special Lancelot-Grail manuscript, as well as on this manuscript’s relationship with the Order of Malta. She has published on the construction of lyric voices and subjectivities across the Romance languages and on religious puns in Occitan romance; on medieval Italian literature, she has written on quantum physics and Dante’s Paradiso.

Her current research focuses on the role of foundresses in medieval French prose romances, and what these immense texts might tell us about contemporary ideas of gender and genealogy. It asks questions such as: are all medieval genealogical trees ‘male’? Is the library a lively, unruly space of cross-pollinating stories that might change history?