Professor of Italian

Tutorial Fellow, Somerville College

Lecturer in Italian, St Catherine’s College and Lady Margaret Hall

Academic background

Francesca Southerden holds a BA (Honours) in Italian and French from Somerville College, Oxford and a D.Phil in Italian literature from Hertford College, Oxford. Before joining Oxford she was Assistant Professor of Italian and Medieval-Renaissance Studies at Wellesley College, MA (2010-16) and Mary Ewart Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Somerville College (2007-10).

Research

Francesca Southerden’s main research interests are in medieval Italian poetry,  particularly Petrarch's lyric poetry and Dante's Commedia. Her most recent book, Dante and Petrarch in the Garden of Language (Legenda, 2022), explores the significance of the garden for Dante and Petrarch's thinking about language and desire and how the authors reimagine Eden in their poetic works. This book develops, within a medieval context, the concern with the relationship between desire, subjectivity, and poetic space that was at the heart of her first monograph, Landscapes of Desire in the Poetry of Vittorio Sereni (Oxford University Press, 2012). She is interested in the relationship between literature and critical theory, including affect studies, ecocriticism, and queer theory, and in lyric studies from the Middle Ages to the present day. Her current projects involve ecological and comparative ways of thinking (with) medieval lyric poetry, especially in dialogue with critical plant studies.

Teaching

Francesca Southerden teaches a broad range of topics within medieval Italian literature. She would be interested in hearing from graduate students who would like to work on thirteenth- or fourteenth century Italian literature and culture, especially Dante, Petrarch, and the early lyric tradition, including those whose proposed projects are interdisciplinary in nature.

Publications

Monographs

Dante and Petrarch in the Garden of Language (London: Legenda, 2022)

Landscapes of Desire in the Poetry of Vittorio Sereni (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

Co-authored books

Possibiities of Lyric: Reading Petrarch in Dialogue, with an Epilogue by Antonella Anedda Angioy (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2020), co-authored with Manuele Gragnolati

Co-edited books

The Oxford Handbook of Dante, co-edited with Manuele Gragnolati and Elena Lombardi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021)

Desire in Dante and the Middle Ages, co-edited with Manuele Gragnolati, Tristan Kay, and Elena Lombardi (Oxford: Legenda, 2012).

Articles and Chapters in Books

'Reading for Atmosphere: Pleasure, Lyric, and Community in the cornice of Boccaccio's Decameron', forthcoming in a Special Issue of Italian Studies, 'Invention, Reenactment, Exchange: Lyric Communities in Medieval and Early Modern Italy', ed. by Laura Banella and Francesco Giusti.

'Petrarchan Metamorphoses: Temporality and Desire in Tasso, Shakespeare, Sor Juana, and Khalvati', co-authored with Manuele Gragnolati, forthcoming in The Oxford Handbook of Italian Literature, ed. by Stefano Jossa.

'The Voice Astray: Caroline Bergvall's Dante', postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies, 15.1 (March 2024), 87-117.

'Ad modum floris: Petrarch's Narcissus between the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta and Triumphi, MLR, 119.1 (January 2024), 89-113.

'"Dopo bevuta d'acqua pura di prato': Tornare all'Eden dantesco in Conglomerati', co-authored with Manuele Gragnolati, in Zanzotto europeo: la sua poesia di movimento, ed. by Giorgia Bongiorno, Andrea Cortellessa, and Laura Toppan Florence: Franco Cesati, 2023), pp. 147-61.

'Becoming Laurel: Openness and Intensity in Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta 23 and

228’, co-authored with Manuele Gragnolati, in Openness in Medieval Europe, ed. by Manuele

Gragnolati and Almut Suerbaum (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2022).

‘The Lyric Mode’, in The Oxford Handbook of Dante, ed. by Gragnolati, Lombardi and

Southerden (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021)

‘Dante Unbound: A Vulnerable Life and the Openness of Interpretation’, co-authored

with Manuele Gragnolati and Elena Lombardi, in The Oxford Handbook of Dante, ed. by

Gragnolati, Lombardi and Southerden (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021)

‘Parlare e lagrimar vedrai insieme’, in Citar Dante [Espressioni dantesche per l’italiano di oggi], ed. by Irene Chirico and others (ETP Books, 2021)

‘From Loss to Capture: Temporality in Cavalcanti, Dante, and Petrarch’s Lyrical

Epiphanies’, co-authored with Manuele Gragnolati, in Medieval Temporalities: The Experience

of Time in Medieval Europe, ed. by Almut Suerbaum and Annie Sutherland (D.S. Brewer,

2021)

‘Compulsion, plaisir, regret: Volonté et passivité dans trois sonnets de Dante, Pétrarque

et Shakespeare’, in Dante et Shakespeare: Cosmologie, Politique, Poétique, ed. by Isabelle Battesti and Pascale Drouet (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2020), pp. 105-24

‘The Art of Rambling: Errant Thoughts and Entangled Passions in Petrarch’s “Ascent of

Mont Ventoux” (Familiares IV, 1) and RVF 129’, in Medieval Thought Experiments: Poetry,

Hypothesis, and Experience in the European Middle Ages, ed. by Philip Knox and others

(Turnhout: Brepols, 2018), pp. 197-221

‘From Paradox to Exclusivity: Dante’s and Petrarch’s Lyrical Eschatologies’, co-authored

with Manuele Gragnolati, in The Unity of Knowledge in the Pre-Modern World: Petrarch and

Boccaccio between the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. by Igor Candido (Berlin: De Gruyter,

2018), pp. 129-50.

‘Between Autobiography and Apocalypse: The Double Subject of Polemic in Petrarch’s

Liber sine nomine and Rerum vulgarium fragmenta’, in Polemic: Language as Violence in Medieval and Early Modern Discourse, ed. by Almut Suerbaum and others (London: Ashgate, 2015), pp. 17-42.

‘Desire as a Dead Letter: A Reading of Petrarch’s RVF 125’, in Desire in Dante and the

Middle Ages, pp. 185-207.

‘Introduction: Transforming Desire’, co-authored with Gragnolati, Kay, and Lombardi,

in Desire in Dante and the Middle Ages, pp. 1-11.

‘“Per-tras-versioni” dantesche: Post-Paradisiacal Constellations in the Poetry of Vittorio

Sereni and Andrea Zanzotto’, in Metamorphosing Dante: Appropriations, Manipulations

and Rewritings in the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries, ed. by Fabio Camilletti and

others (Berlin; Vienna: Verlag Turia und Kant, 2010), pp. 153-74.

‘Lost for Words: Recuperating Melancholy Subjectivity in Dante’s Eden’, in Dante’s

Plurilingualism: Authority, Knowledge, Subjectivity, ed. by Sara Fortuna and others (Oxford:

Legenda, 2010), pp. 193-210.

‘Performative Desires: Sereni’s Re-staging of Dante and Petrarch’, in Aspects of the

Performative in Medieval Culture, ed. by Manuele Gragnolati and Almut Suerbaum (Berlin;

New York: De Gruyter, 2010), pp. 165-96.

‘Dialogo col paesaggio’, in Luino e gli immediati dintorni: Geografie poetiche di Vittorio Sereni (Varese: Insubria University Press, 2010).