St John's College
Cambridge
CB2 1TP
United Kingdom
Matt joined St John’s College as a Junior Research Fellow in October 2019. He studied French and German at Jesus College, Cambridge (2009-13), before completing his MA in French Literature and Culture (2013-14) and PhD in French (2015-19) at King’s College London, where he was supervised by Prof. Simon Gaunt and Prof. Julia Crick.
Matt specialises in medieval literature in French, particularly from comparative, multilingual, and theoretical perspectives. Matt’s doctoral thesis explored the multilingual literary cultures of the medieval Welsh Marches from a new ‘networked’ perspective, developed through an engagement with the philosophy of Bruno Latour. He is currently preparing his PhD thesis for publication as a monograph, as well as working on a new project looking at (perhaps counter-intuitive) images of connectivity in medieval literature, with an initial chapter focussing on the Isle of Avalon.
Other research interests include: the troubadours, trobairitz, and literary culture of medieval Occitania; literary history; theoretical approaches to medieval literature (especially feminist, queer, psychoanalytic, and ecomaterialist).
Matt is particularly interested in initiatives for Widening Participation, and welcomes enquiries on that subject.
Articles
‘Man-Eaters: Cannibalism and Queerness in the Giant-Knight Encounters of the Historia Regum Britanniae, the Roman de Brut, and the Roman de Perceforest’, Exemplaria, 30.4 (2018): 316–336. doi:10.1080/10412573.2018.1503866
‘When Julia Met Jaufre: Encounters with Troubadour Lyric in the Work of Julia Kristeva’, Romance Studies, 36.3 (2018): 122–137. doi:10.1080/02639904.2018.1507295
‘Networking the March: A History of Hereford and its Region from the Eleventh through Thirteenth Centuries’, Journal of the Mortimer History Society, 1 (2017): 55–72.
Book Reviews
‘Joshua Byron Smith, Walter Map and the Matter of Britain (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017)’, forthcoming in The Mediaeval Journal.
‘Helen J. Swift, Representing the Dead: Epitaph Fictions in Late-Medieval France (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 2016)’, The Mediaeval Journal, 7.1 (2018): 186–188. doi:10.1484/J.TMJ.5.115358
Other
‘Ipomedon’, The Literary Encyclopedia, Vol. 1.5.2.01: Old French to the Middle Ages, 500–1400, eds Marianne Ailes, Tim Unwin, and David Williams. 2018. https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=38823
