Professor Sarah Kay, School Visiting Professorial Fellow
Professor Sarah Kay is a Professor of French and a specialist in medieval French and Occitan literatureat Princeton University. She taught in the UK at the University of Liverpool and then at Cambridge; she was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2004 and awarded the degree of Litt.D (Cambridge) in 2005.
Her major publications are an edition of Raoul de Cambrai (Oxford, 1992) and three monographs on aspects of medieval literature (Subjectivity in Troubadour Poetry, Cambridge, 1990; The Chansons de geste in the Age of Romance, Oxford, 1995; Courtly Contradictions, Stanford, 2001). She also co-edited Framing Medieval Bodies (Manchester, 1994) with Miri Rubin, and The Troubadours. An Introduction (Cambridge, 1999) with Simon Gaunt. With Malcolm Bowie and Terence Cave she co-wrote A Short History of French Literature (Oxford, 2003). Her interest in modern thought and theory lead her in 2003 to publish the first monograph in English on the work of Slavoj Zizek.
She has recently launched, with Boydell and Brewer, a new monograph series on French medieval literature, for which she reviews proposals and manuscripts; the first volumes appeared in Spring 2007.
Her current esearch is on the relationship between poetry and knowledge in late medieval France, a 4-year project funded by the British Arts and Humanities Research Council (for more information see http://www.mml.cam.ac.uk/french/poeticknowledge/). She is a member of a project entitled ‘Poetic Knowledge in Late Medieval France’ which documents and analyzes the role of poetry in transmitting and shaping knowledge in the later Middle Ages in France. She will co-write (with Adrian Armstrong and Sylvia Huot) the major work to come out of the project, a volume provisionally entitled Knowing Poetry in Late Medieval France. She is also involved in other collaboratively written works and in advising the other members of the team on their sole-authored works.
During her time at the School, Professor Kay's project was to study the significance of quotations from troubadour poetry within other works composed in the troubadours’ language, medieval Occitan. This research forms part of a major AHRC-funded project on the relation between poetry and knowledge in late medieval France.
Professor Kay contributed to the Dean's Seminar series. She gave a paper on 28th May 2008. As the School's Visiting Professorial Fellow, she will also be giving a lecture which will also be confirmed for 2008 soon.
