Eliza Zingesser

Eliza Zingesser

Education
A.B. summa cum laude, Smith College (2005)
Ph.D. Princeton University (2012)

Research Interests
Medieval French and Occitan literature, music, and culture; multilingualism, language contact, and translation theory; gender, sexuality, and queer theory; ecocriticism; animal studies; voice and sound studies

My current book project, Lovebirds: Avian Erotic Entanglements in Medieval French and Occitan Literature, is about how birds, rather than being mere “symbols” of love, performed actual work with respect to the erotic experience. In each chapter, I turn to a different confluence of birds and human subjects (confluences I propose to call “entanglements”) and to what those confluences enabled erotically. In an introduction, I trace the history of the association between birds and love back to classical antiquity but also forward, showing that it endures to this day in our contemporary erotic vocabulary and imaginary. In the rest of the book, I argue that human-avian entanglements made possible: a type of language that foregrounds the corporeal and sensorial over the semantic (chapter 1, “Pidgin Poetics”), erotic affects such as desire and pleasure (chapter 2, “The Wings of Desire”), the pivoting of love objects (chapter 3, “The Falcon as Fulcrum”), and memory of the love object (chapter 4, “Mnemonic Birds”). In a coda, I explore how metamorphosis into a bird seems to be a requisite condition for physical erotic contact, and especially for procreation, in much medieval literature.

I am also at work on a new project on plant grafting and the way in which it became a way to think through different models of temporality and queer parturition.

My first book, Stolen Song: How the Troubadours Became French (Cornell University Press, 2020), documented 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.

 

Upcoming and Recent Courses

  • “Literature Humanities” (Columbia Core Curriculum)
  • “How to Love: Medieval French and Arabic” (co-taught with Yasmine Seale)
  • “Queer Medieval France”
  • “Eloquent Animals”
  • “Writing Women in Medieval France and England”
  • “Reading and Writing (on) the Body in the Francophone Middle Ages”
  • “Medieval Media Theory”

 

Articles and Book Chapters (all downloadable on my academia.edu page)

“In the Crossing: Grafted Trees in Guillaume de Deguileville’s Pèlerinage de l’âme and Petrus Christus’ ‘Madonna of the Dry Tree.’” In Yale French Studies, special issue on “Strange Landscapes,” ed. Hannah Freed-Thall and Jill Jarvis. (forthcoming)

“The Rhythm of Gender in To the Lighthouse.” In Literature as Sound Studies, ed. yasser elhariry and Liesl Yamaguchi. London: Bloomsbury, 2025, 1-16

“Voice and Species in the Ovide moralisé.” Journal for Interdisciplinary Voice Studies 8:2 (2024), 1-16

“Chrétien the Jay: Avian Rhetoric in Philomena.” Rhetorica: A Journal of the History of Rhetoric 38.2 (2020): 156-179

“The Poets of the North: Economies of Literature and Love.” In Musical Culture in the World of Adam de la Halle, ed. Jennifer Saltzstein. Leiden: Brill (2019), 51-76

“Francophone Troubadours: Assimilating Occitan Lyric in Medieval France.” In Medieval Francophone Literary Culture Outside France, ed. Dirk Schoenaers and Nicola Morato. Turnhout: Brepols (2018), 371-387

“Pidgin Poetics: Bird Talk in Medieval France and Occitania.” New Medieval Literatures 17 (2017): 62-80. (Winner of the Malcolm Bowie Prize for the “best article by an early-career researcher” from the Society for French Studies)

“Remembering to Forget Richard de Fournival’s Bestiaire d’amour in Italy: The Case of Pierpont Morgan MS 459.” French Studies 69.4 (2015): 439-448

“The Vernacular Panther: Encyclopedism, Citation, and French Authority in Nicole de Margival’s Dit de la panthère.” Modern Philology 109.3 (2012): 301-311

“The Genesis of Poetry: Machaut’s Prologue, Boethius’ 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

Last updated January 2025