Modern and Medieval Languages

Dr Giulia Boitani is a College Teaching Officer in French and Italian at King’s, and the Director of Studies for our First Years.

"I work on medieval literature across Romance languages, particularly medieval French, Occitan and Italian.  My recent research focuses on the role of foundresses in medieval French prose romances, but I also look at medieval manuscripts and their particular idiosyncrasies (every single manuscript of any given medieval text is different!); representations of food and feeding in medieval literature; and the ways in which current critical practices – particularly eco-critical approaches - might engage with medieval thought.

I teach Introduction to French literature, film and thought (FR1) and Introduction to Italian Texts and Contexts (IT1/ITA3) in the first year; Medieval French Literature (FR3), and Translation and Oral Italian (ITB2) in the second, and medieval French and Occitan literature (FR7, FR15) in the fourth year; as well as paleography courses for our MPhil in in European, Latin American and Comparative Literatures and Cultures (ELAC)."

I am a Professor in Modern French Philosophy and Literature in the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics and Direct Studies at King's for student's in their third year spent abroad.

My research focuses on twentieth-century and contemporary French literature and philosophy. I have worked extensively on contemporary French philosophy and also on the reception in France of German thought. In particular I have engaged with specific thinkers working in the wake of postmodernism and also on the interplay between philosophy and other areas of knowledge (e.g. aesthetics and artistic or literary practice, but also political thought).

I teach second and fourth year papers on twentieth-century and contemporary French literature, film, and thought (FR6, FR12), the fourth year comparative paper, 'The Body' (CS5) , and on the critical theory and modern French courses of our  MPhil in in European, Latin American and Comparative Literatures and Cultures (ELAC).

Georgia is Research Fellow in the Literatures of the Global South at King’s College, Cambridge. After reading for a BA in English at Queen Mary, University of London (2013–2016) and an MSt in English at the University of Oxford (2016–2017), she completed a DPhil in Medieval and Modern Languages at the University of Oxford in 2023. Her DPhil research was concerned with multilingualism and translationality, with an emphasis on the work of Angolan author José Luandino Vieira. More broadly, she has research interests in colonial and anticolonial literatures, transnationalism and internationalism, and Cold War aesthetics, as well as colonial and decolonial linguistics, multi-, pluri-, and translingualism, and literatures written in and across European and African languages.

As a Research Fellow at King's, she is exploring how performance companies, festivals, and the space of the theatre have operated as transnational sites of internationalist activity across Africa and the Americas between the 1960s and the 1980s, foregrounding the literary and intellectual production of Portuguese-speaking nations within comparative frameworks. She is currently organising an international conference, ‘Translation Networks in the Decolonising World, 1950s–1970s’, which will take place at King’s in April 2026.

She has recently held a Senior Lectureship in Portuguese and a Departmental Lectureship in Brazilian and African Portuguese at the University of Oxford’s Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages. Between 2022–2024, Georgia also acted as Co-ordinator of the Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation (OCCT) Research Centre, based at St Anne’s College, Oxford where she organised the Centre’s activities and events — including seminars and panel discussions, workshops and conferences, international exchanges, in addition to the annual Oxford Translation Day — and contributed to the development of the Centre’s research agenda. In 2025, she acted as judge for the Stephen Spender Trust’s Portuguese Spotlight Prize.

I am Associate Professor of Latin American Literary and Cultural Studies and look after students taking Spanish at King’s. 

I’ve published books on la Violencia in Colombia, on Latin American popular culture and cultural studies, and on the transnational dimensions of Spanish Studies. My current research looks at representations of Colombia’s largest river, the Río Magdalena, and includes steamboat narratives, poetry by black and mixed-race artisans and boatmen, poetry and art about river burials, novels, cartoons and films about a bloat of renegade hippos, and writings about mangrove mud. It’s taken me to some pretty wild places, and I’ve made a film and exhibited my photographs in the process. 

When I’m not splashing about in swamps, I teach the first-year Introduction to the Language, Literature and Cultures of the Spanish-speaking World (SP1), the second-year Latin American Culture and History paper (SP5), two final-year Latin American literature and culture papers (SP12 and SP13), and specialist courses on literature, film and theory on the M. MPhils in Latin American Studies and in European, Latin American and Comparative Literatures and Cultures (ELAC).

Together with Giulia and Ian, I run college-based seminars on modern critical theory in which we explore different ways of thinking about culture, power, sexuality, race, gender, ecology, memory and more. 

Angus works on the history of Mongol and post-Mongol Eurasia, with a particular focus on the politics and institutions of Rus’ and Moscow in the late medieval period. His doctoral thesis traced the evolution of fiscal models in the regions conquered by the Mongol khans. As part of his research fellowship at King’s, he hopes to explore the role language and translation can play in studying the cross-cultural interactions of pre-modern societies. Angus studied for his PhD in Slavonic Studies at Trinity College, Cambridge, after an undergraduate degree in History and Russian, and a master’s degree in Late Antique and Byzantine Studies at the University of Oxford.

As a Professorial Fellow at King’s I supervise students across all years in German literature and I am Director of Studies for MMLL students in their second year.  

I am interested in the culture and literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with a particular focus on the following areas: women’s writing, the works of German-Jewish writers produced in Germany and in exile; translingual literary production; and postmigrant writing. 

I am currently working on two projects. One is concerned with exploring the construction of belonging incontemporary German-language writing by Jewish authors who have come to Germany or Austria from the former Soviet Union; the other is concerned with literature produced in exile from Nazi Germany: it seeks to understand the strategies and power of the family novel genre in capturing the history of German Jews.

Recent publications: 

• Contested Communities: Minor, Minority and Small Literatures in Europe (Oxford: Legenda, 2023; co-edited with Kate Averis and Margaret Littler)
• Georg Hermann, Die daheim blieben, edited and introduced by G. Weiss-Sussex (Wallstein, 2023)
• Barbara Honigmann (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2023; co-edited with Robert Gillett);
• Rethinking Minor Literatures – Contemporary Jewish Womens’ Writing in Germany and Austria, Special Issue of Modern Languages Open (June 2020), co-edited with Maria Roca Lizarazu. Open Access publication: https://www.modernlanguagesopen.org/collections/special/rethinking-minor...