College: Selwyn

Email: rlr36@cam.ac.uk

Supervisor: Professor Heather Webb

About

Becky completed a BA in Modern and Medieval Languages (Italian and Spanish) at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, with a year abroad spent studying medieval and early modern literature at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. In 2022, she graduated with an MPhil in European, Latin American and Comparative Literatures and Cultures from Selwyn College. During her MPhil, she developed a particular focus on medieval Italian literature and devotional culture, and wrote on various aspects of medieval Italian culture including Dante, Petrarch, Jacopone da Todi, Guido Cavalcanti, Catherine of Siena and Angela of Foligno. Her current PhD project, provisionally entitled ‘Temporalities and Relationalities in Late Medieval Italian Literature Across Gender and Genre Boundaries’, compares themes in male-authored poetry and female-authored religious writings from 13th-14th century Italy, through a queer theoretical lens.

Teaching Interests

Supervisor on:
ITA3: Texts and Contexts
IT4: Autobiography and Self-Representation in Italian Culture (Dante and Petrarch)

Research interests

• Dante
• Guido Cavalcanti
• Catherine of Siena
• Iacopone da Todi
• Angela of Foligno
• Early Italian lyric poetry
• Franciscan and Dominican religious cultures
• Late medieval women religious
• Affective piety
• Women’s writing 
• Feminist theory
• Queer theory
• Medieval visual culture
• Temporality

Published works

Review of Maria Luisa Ardizzone ‘The Young Dante: Archetypes of his Early Intellectual Biography’ (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2022), Italian Studies 77 (4)

Conference Papers:
‘Reading Angela of Foligno with Guido Cavalcanti: Corporeal Vulnerability and Gender Ambiguity’, Cambridge Italian Graduate Conference, June 2022

‘Le temporalità queer della morte nella Vita nova’, Alma Dante, Università di Bologna, May 2023

‘I’ vo come colui ch’è fuor di vita: Guido Cavalcanti’s Walking Corpse between Automata and Iconography’, Cambridge Italian Graduate Conference, June 2023

‘Affective Devotion and the Liminality of Touch in Angela of Foligno’s Liber’, Cambridge SIS Themed Conference (Affect, Sensation, Emotion), September 2023

‘From Paternity to Fraternity: Queer Family Formation in the Commedia’, Dante Futures, University of Leeds, November 2023