Emma Campbell

Emma Campbell

Emma Campbell

Assistant Professor of French Literature


School: Columbian College of Arts and Sciences

Contact:

Email: Emma Campbell
Columbian College of Arts & Sciences 801 22nd Street, NW, 513H Washington DC 20052

Focusing on medieval textual traditions written in French, Emma Campbell’s
research considers how the study of medieval culture can speak to modern and
contemporary ways of thinking, notably in relation to feminist, queer, and
transgender studies, postcolonial theory, and translation studies. Campbell’s
scholarship is interested in how the medieval past and critical theory unsettle
received ideas and, in so doing, offer ways to explore alternative perspectives on
familiar concepts and historical narratives. Campbell has published on a broad range
of medieval French texts prior to the fourteenth century, including major traditions
such as saints’ lives and bestiaries. This work has been supported by numerous
awards, including grants from U.K. funding bodies such as the Arts and Humanities
Research Council. Campbell’s most recent book, Reinventing Babel in Medieval
French: Translation and Untranslatability (c. 1120–c. 1250), contributes both to
discussions of premodern authorship and textuality, and to debates about the
importance of historical translation beyond medieval studies. Earlier publications on
saints, including Campbell’s first book Medieval Saints’ Lives: The Gift, Kinship, and
Community in Old French Hagiography, explore how medieval hagiography provides
an important site for challenging established social, sexual, and gender norms.
Campbell is co-editor of Rethinking Medieval Translation: Ethics, Politics, Theory and
of Troubled Vision: Gender, Sexuality, and Sight in Medieval Text and Image. Their
new book project, A Moral Ecology of Creation, explores the importance of another
major medieval textual tradition for questions of enduring relevance to the present,
by examining how medieval bestiaries have an unexpected significance for sex-
gender histories.

 


Single-authored Books
A Moral Ecology of Creation: Gender and Sexuality in Medieval French Bestiaries. (Book manuscript in progress)

Reinventing Babel in Medieval French: Translation and Untranslatability (c. 1120–c. 1250), Oxford Studies in Medieval Literature and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023) 352 pages. ISBN 978-0-19287-171-8

Medieval Saints’ Lives: The Gift, Kinship and Community in Old French Hagiography (Woodbridge: D. S. 
Brewer, 2008) 274 pages. ISBN 978-1-84384-180-7

Edited Volumes
The Horizons of Medieval French and Occitan: New Approaches to Manuscripts and Texts, edited with Luke Sunderland (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming)

Rethinking Medieval Translation: Ethics, Politics, Theory, edited with Robert Mills (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2012) 304 pages. ISBN 978-1-84384-329-0

Troubled Vision: Gender, Sexuality and Sight in Medieval Text and Image, edited with Robert Mills (New York: Palgrave, 2004) 243 pages. ISBN 978-1-137-11451-8

Peer-Reviewed Articles
‘Introduction’, Rematerializing Ecologies on the Medieval Page, Special Issue of Cahiers de Recherches Médiévales et Humanistes (forthcoming)

‘Sound and Vision: Bruno Latour and the Languages of Philippe de Thaon’s Bestiaire’, Category Crossings: Bruno Latour and Medieval Modes of Existence, ed. by Marilynn Desmond and Noah Guynn, Special Issue of The Romanic Review, 111:1 (2020), 128–50
    <http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.1215/00358118-8007985>

‘Translating Gender in Thirteenth-Century French Cross-dressing Narratives: Le Roman de Silence and La Vie de Sainte Euphrosine’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 49:2 (2019), 233–64     <http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.1215/10829636-7506510>

‘The Library in Twelfth- and Thirteenth-Century French Literature: Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s Roman de Troie, Chrétien de Troyes’s Cligès, and Adenet le Roi’s Berte as grans piés’, The Medieval Library, ed. by Tom Hinton and Luke Sunderland, Special Issue of French Studies, 70:2 (2016), 187–200 <http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.1093/fs/knw006>

‘The Time of Translation in Wauchier de Denain’s Histoire des Moines d’Egypte’, Florilegium, 31 (2014), 1–29 <http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.3138/flor.31.01>

‘Political Animals: Human/Animal Life in Bisclavret and Yonec’, Exemplaria, 25:2 (2013), 95–109 <http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.1179/1041257313Z.00000000027>

‘Epistemology of the Cloister: Knowledge, Identity and Place in Old French Saints’ Lives’, Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures, 36:2 (2010), 205–32 <http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.5325/jmedirelicult.36.2.0205>

‘The Queer Transformations of Flaubert’s “Légende de saint Julien l’Hospitalier”’, Sanctity, ed. by Cary Howie, Special Issue of L’Esprit Créateur,  50:1 (2010), 62–76 <http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.1353/esp.0.0204&gt;

Homo Sacer: Power, Life and the Sexual Body in Old French Saints’ Lives’, Exemplaria, 18:2 (2006), 233–73 
<http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.1179/exm.2006.18.2.233>

‘Separating the Saints from the Boys: Sainthood and Masculinity in the Old French Vie de Saint Alexis’, French Studies, 57:4 (2003), 447–62 <http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.1093/fs/57.4.447>

‘Sexual Poetics and the Politics of Translation in the Tale of Griselda’, Comparative Literature, 55:3 (2003), 191–216 <http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.1215/-55-3-191>

Peer-Reviewed Book Chapters
‘Translanguaging and Multimediality in Philippe de Thaon’s Medieval “French” Bestiaire’, in Medieval Bestiaries: New Approaches, ed. by Debra Strickland (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming)

‘Visualizing the Trans-Animal Body: The Hyena in Medieval Bestiaries’, in Trans Historical: Gender Plurality Before the Modern, ed. by Anna Kłosowska, Masha Raskolnikov, and Greta LaFleur (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2021), pp. 235–66  

‘The Scandals of Medieval Translation: Thinking Difference in Francophone Texts and Manuscripts’, in The French of Medieval England: Essays in Honor of Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, ed. by Thelma Fenster and Carolyn Collette (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2017), pp. 38–54

‘The Ethics of Translatio in Rutebeuf’s Miracle de Théophile’, in Rethinking Medieval Translation: Ethics, Politics, Theory, ed. by Emma Campbell and Robert Mills (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2012), pp. 107–24

‘Commemoration in La Mort le Roi Artu’, in Arthurian Literature, ed. by Elizabeth Archibald and David F. Johnson (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2010), vol. 27, pp. 1–17

‘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

Contributions to Catalogues and Reference Works
‘Untranslatability’, in A Cultural History of Translation in an Age of Cross-cultural Interaction (11th–16th c. CE), Vol. 3, ed. by Marie-Alice Belle and Michelle Bolduc (London: Bloomsbury, forthcoming)

‘Marie de France: Identity and Authorship in Translation’, in Women and Medieval Literary Culture from the Early Middle Ages to the Fifteenth Century, ed. by Corinne Saunders and Diane Watt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), pp. 379–99 <http://dx.doi:10.1017/9781108869485.019>

‘Philippe de Thaon’s Bestiaire’, in AHRC Translating Cultures Online Exhibition (forthcoming)

‘Untranslatability’, in Translating Cultures: A Glossary, ed. by Charles Forsdick and Barbara Spadaro (forthcoming)

‘Hagiography, Gender, and the Power of Social Norms’, in Hagiography and the History of Latin Christendom, 500–1500, ed. by Samantha Kahn Herrick (Leiden: Brill, 2020), pp. 375–96 <http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.1163/9789004417472_020>

‘The Bestiary in Translation’, in Book of Beasts: The Bestiary in the Medieval World, ed. by Elizabeth Morrison with the assistance of Larisa Grollemond (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2019), pp. 151–55

‘The Politics of Medieval European Translation’, in The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Politics, ed. by Fruela Fernández and Jonathan Evans (London and New York: Routledge, 2018), pp. 410–23    <http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.4324/9781315621289-27>

‘Vie de Saint Alexis’, in The Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature in Britain, ed. by Siân Echard and Robert Rouse, 4 vols. (Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 2017), vol. 4, pp. 1863–66     <http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.1002/9781118396957.wbemlb472>

‘Saints’ Lives, Violence and Community’, in The Cambridge History of French Literature, ed. by William Burgwinkle, Nicholas Hammond, and Emma Wilson (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

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

Other published reviews in: Medium Ævum, The Medieval Review, French Studies, Speculum, H-France, the Revue des Langues Romanes, and the Bulletin of International Medieval Research.

Translations
Nancy, Jean-Luc, ‘Our World: An Interview’, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 8:2 (2003), 43–54 <http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.1080/0969725032000162567>

 

 

 

 

  • FREN 3100 W: Introduction to French Literature
  •  FREN 3210: Medieval and Early Modern French Literature in Context
  • FREN 3600: Journeys Through Medieval Worlds: Stories, Landscapes, and
    Mobility
  •  FREN 4500: Challenging Nature: Sex, Gender, and Embodiment in Medieval
    French Texts