Dr Franklin-Brown completed her undergraduate work at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire and her Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley. In between, she studied for several years in France, first Toulouse and then Paris. Her teaching career began in the Department of French and Italian at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. She moved to Cambridge in 2019.
An early project produced a book on medieval encyclopaedias, Reading the World: Encyclopedic Writing of the Scholastic Age (University of Chicago Press, 2012), and she has published numerous book chapters and articles on a range of literary texts in their cultural context, from the architectural environment and manuscripts of the troubadours to French and Occitan epic poetry, romance, Latin lyric poetry of the Middle Ages, and early chess pieces.
Her current projects include a study of troubadour lyric (the work of the singer-songwriters of the south of France in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries), a study of medieval and early modern chess, and a study of a silver-gilt cup that was commissioned by Humfrey and Eleanor, Duke and Duchess of Gloucester, and was given to Christ’s College by Lady Margaret Beaufort. This last project arose from her work as Honorary Keeper of the Plate in College.
Selected Publications:
“Singers in Hall and Chamber: The Changed Song of the First Troubadours,” Models of Change in Medieval Textual Culture, edited by Jonatan Pettersson and Anna Blennow, Berlin: De Gruyter, forthcoming 2024.
“Knights, Pawns, and Troubadours: Constructing Troubadour Identity through the Arabic Language of Chess,’ Troubadour Texts and Contexts: Honor of Wendy Pfeffer, edited by Courtney Wells, Lisa Bevevino, and Sarah-Grace Heller, Martlesham: Boydell & Brewer, forthcoming 2024.
“Metamorphoses of the Elephant: Play, Form, and Change in Chess,” Standardization in the Middle Ages, edited by Line Cecilie Engh and Kristin Aavitsland, Berlin: De Gruyter, forthcoming 2024.
“Fugitive Figures: On the Modes of Existence of Medieval Automata in Old French Narrative,” in “Medieval Assemblages: Bruno Latour and the ‘Sociology of Translation,’” edited by Marilynn Desmond and Noah Guynn, Romanic Review 111 (2020): 66–84.
“The Monstrous Birth of Alexander the Great: Thomas of Kent’s Roman de toute chevalerie and Twelfth-Century Natural Science,” in “Versions of the Natural,” special issue of the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, edited by Sarah Kay and Nicolette Zeeman, 49.3 (2019): 541–61.
“Les signatures de Pierre de Blois: Rapport entre figures visuelles et acoustiques dans un recueil de poésies lyriques du XIIe siècle,” in Belles Lettres: Les Figures de l’écrit au Moyen Âge, edited by Marion Uhlig and Martin Rohde, Scrinium Friburgense, Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019, 329–53.
