Professor Francesca Southerden
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 research focuses on the relationship between language and desire in the works of Dante and Petrarch and in medieval Italian lyric poetry more broadly. 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 the concept of lyric from the Middle Ages to the present day.
Teaching
Francesca Southerden teaches a broad range of topics within medieval Italian literature. She is 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. She is also happy to supervise projects with an interdisciplinary focus within medieval Italian literaure.
