Dr Emma Campbell
email: emma dot campbell at warwick dot ac dot uk
phone: 024 765 23332
Jump to: Background - Research Interests - Teaching Interests - Publications
Background
After finishing a BA in English and French and an MA in Medieval Studies at the University of Leeds, I moved to King's College London to complete a PhD on Old French saints' lives under the supervision of Simon Gaunt. Following the submission of my thesis in 2003, I spent a year as a funded postdoctoral researcher and auditrice libre at the ENS in Lyon. I taught as a lecturer in the French Department at Leeds for a year before taking up my post at Warwick.
Research Interests
My research to-date, which has focused on the significant but largely neglected corpus of Old French saints’ lives, is innovative in two ways: it demonstrates the critical interest of texts traditionally overlooked by literary scholars and brings critical theory to bear on this material in ways that challenge previous scholarship, not only ‘applying’ theory but also considering how these texts disrupt philosophies of power and community as well as psychoanalytic, feminist and queer theoretical models. My monograph - Medieval Saints’ Lives: The Gift, Kinship and Community in Old French Hagiography (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2008) - is a key example of this approach. Similar agendas are pursued in other publications, notably my co-edited collection Troubled Vision and articles from 2003 (‘Separating the Saints From the Boys’), 2006 (‘Homo Sacer’) and 2010 ('Epistemology of the Cloister').
My current project on translation, which has received support from the AHRC, engages with new research on language and cross-cultural contact from within and outside medieval studies, drawing on the concepts and methodologies of postcolonial scholarship and translation studies. My next monograph explores notions of translation and the untranslatable in Old French and Anglo-Norman texts from this perspective. My approach to translation in this project is distinctive in that it is not primarily based on an investigation of sources or models. Rather, the project explores how, in the context of a changing picture of medieval language and culture, translation can be seen to function conceptually as well as practically in francophone texts and manuscripts. I argue that, within this context, greater attention should be paid to how medieval vernacular writers figure the untranslatable in the form of the impossibility or failure of translation. What such an investigation adds to more established source-based approaches is a focus on how medieval writers attempted to translate meanings or messages that wholly or partially escaped linguistic expression as well as – or even instead of – source texts.
My interest in medieval translation is also being pursued through other projects and research events. I remain closely involved with a research collective on medieval translation that has been meeting since 2008 and I recently completed a co-edited volume with Dr Robert Mills on the ethics and politics of translation in the Middle Ages.
My main research interests are: Old French literature; manuscript studies; translation; modern philosophy and critical theory. I have worked on a broad range of twelfth- and thirteenth-century texts and am particularly interested in theoretically-oriented approaches to medieval literature and manuscript studies, notably in relation to feminism and queer theory, anthropology, postcolonial theory and translation studies. I would be able to supervise in any of these areas.
Teaching Interests
My main teaching interests are in medieval literature and culture and in modern philosophy and critical theory. In addition to my language teaching, I currently co-ordinate and teach on the French Culture and Society module; I lecture on the first-year Strategies for Reading French Texts module; I teach second-year modules on Chrétien de Troyes and the uses of the past in medieval literature and modern French literature and film; and I teach a final-year module on the transformation of the body in high medieval French texts.
Publications
Monographs
Edited Volumes
Articles
‘Political Animals: Human/Animal Life in Bisclavret and Yonec', Exemplaria
, 25:2 (2013), 95-109
‘Epistemology of the Cloister: Knowledge, Identity and Place in Old French Saints’ Lives’, Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures, 36:2 (2010), 205-232
‘The Queer Transformations of Flaubert’s “Légende de saint Julien l’Hospitalier”’, L’Esprit Créateur, 50 :1 (2010), 62-76
‘Homo Sacer: Power, Life and the Sexual Body in Old French Saints’ Lives’, Exemplaria, 18:2 (2006), 233-73
‘Separating the Saints From the Boys: Sainthood and Masculinity in the Old French Vie de Saint Alexis’, French Studies, 57:4 (2003), 447-462
‘Sexual Poetics and the Politics of Translation in the Tale of Griselda’, Comparative Literature, 55:3 (2003), 191-216
Book Chapters
‘Saints’ Lives, Violence and Community’, in The Cambridge History of French Literature, ed. by Bill Burgwinkle et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 38-46
'Clerks and Laity', in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval French Literature, ed. by Simon Gaunt and Sarah Kay (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 210-24
‘Sacrificial Spectacle and Interpassive Vision in the Anglo-Norman Life of Saint Faith’, in Troubled Vision: Gender, Sexuality and Sight in Medieval Text and Image, ed. by Emma Campbell and Robert Mills (New York: Palgrave, 2004), pp. 97-115
Review Articles
Ruth Mazo Karras, Sexuality in Medieval Europe: Doing Unto Others; Anna Kłosowska, Queer Love in the Middle Ages; and Karma Lochrie, Heterosynchrasies: Female Sexuality When Normal Wasn’t: Signs, 32:2 (2007), 539-44
‘Cultural Traffic in the Medieval Romance World: A Survey of Current Research’, Journal of Romance Studies, 4:3 (2004), 97-116
I am a regular reviewer for Medium Aevum, The Medieval Review and French Studies. I have also published reviews in Speculum, the Revue des Langues Romanes and the Bulletin of International Medieval Research.
Translations
‘Our World: An Interview’, Angelaki, 8:2 (2003), 43-54. Interview with Jean-Luc Nancy, with translator’s introduction.
