Dr Emily Kate Price

Public Engagement:

Emily collaborates with Dr Sura Qadiri on projects aimed at bringing their research to a wider audience. They recently gave a talk at the Cambridge Festival on the use of the book as a technology between medieval France and 21st-century Algeria. Sura and Emily are currently devising a project using textiles to explore the imbrication of life and literature as it plays out in their current research.

Research interests: 

Emily specializes in medieval literature in French, Occitan, Italian and sometimes Latin, with a particular focus on song and poetry. She works across the Middle Ages, from the tenth to the fifteenth centuries, and often brings medieval literature into dialogue with contemporary thought.

Working between languages and periods and often at the intersection of literature, music and philosophy, as well as manuscript and visual culture, her research tests disciplinary boundaries based on language and periodization. Broadly conceived, her work asks how literary works created and create connections between people, animals and things across time and space, or, put most simply, how literature helps us to live.

Her current book project, which was supported by a CRASSH Early Career Fellowship, draws on insights from medieval philosophy and music theory as well as queer theory, ecocriticism and sound studies to examine how lament helped medieval people understand and cope with life in an uncertain and ever-changing world. She is also looking towards a new project on forms of life in medieval culture, and she continues to pursue her interest in the relationship of the senses to thought. Other research interests include translation (both theory and practice) and the intersection between translation and the material text.

Emily has written on the early reception of troubadour song in Catalonia, on Bruno Latour and medieval lyric futures, on dance and Dante, and on Petrarch’s tears (forthcoming). Emily is also contributing to a group project on Medieval Poetic Anthologies with colleagues from various institutions in the UK and abroad.