Dr Giulia Boitani

Research interests: 

Giulia is a medieval literary scholar whose interests span across medieval Romance literature, particularly medieval French, Occitan and Italian.  Her recent research focuses on  the role of foundresses in medieval French prose romances, and what these immense texts might tell us about contemporary ideas of gender, power relationships, and genealogy. She is also interested at looking at the different manuscript and cultural contexts  – especially from the 14th and 15th century – that shape a medieval text; in the construction of lyric voices and subjectivities across the Romance languages; and the ways in which current eco-critical practices might engage with medieval thought.

Giulia obtained her BA and MA in Romance philology and literature at the University of Rome ‘La Sapienza’, and pursued her postgraduate studies at the University of Cambridge in 2016. She was a Society for French Studies Prize Postdoctoral Fellow in 2020 at Cambridge. She is an Official Fellow in French and Italian at King’s College.

Recent research projects: 

‘Family Ties. Women and Genealogy in Medieval French Prose Romances’.

Published works: 

•  ‘Diffracting Paradiso: The stakes of knowing and being in paradise’, Italian Studies 80.3 (2025): 257-269.
•  ‘History Branches Out. Narrative and Chronology in Bodmer 147’ in Making History with Manuscripts in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed by Johannes Junge Ruhland (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2025), pp. 225-251. 
• With Henry Ravenhall, ‘A Hospitaller Book in Fifteenth-Century Florence: Notes on the Owners of Cologny, Bodmer 147’, in print with Medioevo Romanzo XVIII (2), 2024.
• ‘Tristan’s Origins. Foucault, History, and Genealogy in the Prehistory of the Prose Tristan’, Romanic Review 113.1 (2022), 177-198.
• ‘A Note on Liturgical and Mystical Quotations in Flamenca’, Medium Aevum, 88.1 (2019), 93-115.