Eliza Zingesser (A.B. Smith College, Ph.D. Princeton) is a specialist of medieval French and Occitan literature. She was formerly a Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge (2012-2013) and an Assistant Professor at the University of Ottawa (2013-2014). She is particularly interested in issues of cultural and linguistic contact, gender and sexuality, and animal studies. She is currently completing a book manuscript entitled Stolen Song: How the Troubadours Became French. Stolen Song documents for the first time the act of cultural appropriation that created a founding moment for French literary history: the rescripting and domestication of troubadour song, a prestige corpus in the European sphere, as French, and the simultaneous creation of an alternative point of origin for French literary history—a body of faux-archaic Occitanizing song.  

Eliza Zingesser was a member of the Executive Committee of the MLA Discussion Group for Provençal Language and Literature (2010-2015). She has received grants and awards from the Medieval Academy of America, the Fulbright Foundation, the Institut Français d’Amérique, the Josephine de Kármán Fellowship Trust, and the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Selected Publications:

“Pidgin Poetics: Bird Talk in Medieval France and Occitania.” Forthcoming in New Medieval Literatures 17 (2017)

“The Poets of the North.” In Musical Culture in the World of Adam de la Halle, ed. Jennifer Saltzstein. Leiden: Brill. Forthcoming.

“French Troubadours: Assimilating Occitan Poetry in Medieval France (1200-1400).” In Medieval Francophone Literary Culture Outside France, ed. Dirk Schoenaers and Nicola Morato. Turnhout: Brepols. Forthcoming.

“Remembering to Forget Richard de Fournival’s Bestiaire d’amour in Italy: The Case of Pierpont Morgan MS 459.” Forthcoming in French Studies 69.4 (2015)

“The Vernacular Panther: Encyclopedism, Citation, and French Authority in Nicole de Margival’s Dit de la panthère.” Modern Philology109:3 (2012): 301-311

“The Genesis of Poetry: Machaut’s Prologue, Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy and Chartrian Neoplatonism.” Viator 42:2 (2011): 143-156

“The Value of Verse: Storytelling as Accounting in Froissart’s Dit du florin.” Modern Language Notes 125:4 (2010): 861-872

“Rabelais et Ésope en images.” Études Rabelaisiennes 50 (2010): 23-42