Research Corner

For this year’s “Research Corner” (2006) we have asked faculty members, lecturers, instructors and graduate students to share their thoughts, experiences and progress on their current research.

We want to begin this section by congratulating Professor of French and Women’s Studies Doris Kadish, who has been named Distinguished Research Professor. Please follow the link for an interesting article about her research program: http://www.franklin.uga.edu/news/2007/article16_07.htm

Noel Fallows, Professor of Spanish and Head. Dr. Fallows’s latest research project was published in 2006 by the Spanish Ministry of Defense. This book is an annotated critical edition of three military treatises written by Alonso de Cartagena (1384-1456). Cartagena was born a Jew. His entire family converted to Catholicism in the 1390s. His father, who had previously been a prominent rabbi, eventually became the bishop of Burgos, the most powerful episcopal see in medieval Castile. Alonso succeeded his father in this position. As bishop of Burgos Alonso de Cartagena wrote three important military treatises in which he advocates in favor of the Reconquest and the destruction of Islam from a strictly legal point of view. He began work on these treatises in 1434 during a diplomatic mission to Portugal where he befriended Prince Duarte. Duarte had strong connections with the University of Bologna (Italy) and shared his knowledge of the latest Italian humanist intellectual trends with Cartagena. Cartagena’s writings are quite complex, for at the same time as he interprets the law to pursue his crusade against Muslim-occupied Granada, he also subtly advocates for tolerance towards Jews in Castile. His work also combines a strong knowledge of medieval law with the cutting-edge intellectual trends of renaissance Italy. Dr. Fallows’s book is the result of research on manuscripts held in the Biblioteca Nacional and the Escorial Monastery in Spain, as well as research on a large number of medieval law codes. Dr. Fallows’s current research project is nearing completion. It is the result of over ten years of work on medieval Spanish and Catalan jousting treatises. This book sheds much new light on the lost ‘art’ of jousting and demonstrates that this sport was by no means as simple as scholars have traditionally believed. In fact, jousting required strength, agility, intellectual acumen and great skill. His book is unique in that it combines analyses of jousting manuals, fictional accounts of jousts from a large number of European texts (primarily from Spain, France, England, Germany and Italy), pictorial representations of jousts in illuminated manuscripts, and last but by no means least, analyses of pieces of armor held in collections in Europe (Madrid, Glasgow, London, Vienna, etc.) and the U.S. (primarily in NYC and Worcester, Mass.).

Catherine Jones, Associate Professor of French. Dr. Jones’s research focuses primarily on the medieval French epic or chanson de geste. In recent years, she has been particularly interested in various forms of rewriting, particularly the Middle French prose translations of earlier verse texts. Despite its tremendous popularity in the later Middle Ages, the mise en prose stands as one of the last frontiers in medieval studies. Over fifty chansons de geste were reworked into prose between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries for patrons and audiences who demanded updated, derhymed versions of heroic songs. While most of the mises en prose were commissioned by noble patrons, the genre did attract one author who worked outside the system of patronage. Philippe de Vigneulles (1471-1527), a cloth merchant of Metz, translated the monumental Lorraine epic cycle into Middle French prose in the context of urban politics. The author of chronicles, novellas, and a journal of his life, Philippe lived and worked on the margins of the space occupied by professional writers and illuminators. His projects were self-imposed and reflect a pronounced civic bias. The Lorraine heroic songs afforded him an opportunity to reconfigure the city’s legendary past and validate the concerns of a prosperous merchant class. Dr. Jones has just completed a book manuscript entitled Philippe de Vigneulles and the Prosaics of Translatio, which examines the craft of prose translation in the context of the author’s larger cultural agenda. This autodidact of peasant ancestry is perhaps our most comprehensive source of information on late medieval prosification. Philippe fills the paratextual spaces of his works with abundant commentary on the translator’s task and audience expectations. Moving beyond a simple comparison between source and translation, Dr. Jones’s study considers the text as an integral part of a corpus. Implicit and explicit links between the mise en prose and Philippe’s other works highlight specific aspects of the narrative, weaving the epic legend into the author’s civic, personal, and aesthetic preoccupations. This perspective illuminates a previously neglected sphere of medieval literary production, revealing fundamental assumptions about the epic tradition and the power of prose in urban culture.
Below you will find information about another aspect of Dr. Jones’s professional commitment not only to her research agenda, teaching and service to the Department of Romance Languages, but also to education in general, particularly that of people with physical impediments. For twenty years she has been a volunteer who reads and records textbooks for the blind and dyslexic. http://www.uga.edu/columns/061120/news-textbooks.html

Scott Weintraub joined the Department of Romance Languages this past fall as a Spanish Instructor. He recently defended his Ph.D. dissertation (entitled Reading the Crisis, Crisis of Reading: Politics, Ethics, and Poetics in Néstor Perlongher, Osvaldo Lamborghini, and Raúl Zurita) in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Emory University. His research and teaching interests include 19th, 20th and 21st century Latin American poetry and poetics, critical theory, cultural studies, continental philosophy, avant-garde poetics, and digital poetry and rhetoric. Scott is editing a special issue of Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture, which is entitled “Membranous Topographies” (forthcoming in Winter 2008), and is co-editing with Professor Luis Correa-Díaz a book of essays on the poetry of the Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro. On the rare occasions when Scott is not working, he spends time with his fiancée Kacey (who is a second-year student at UGA’s School of Veterinary Medicine) and their two dogs Myles and Cinnamon, while invariably sipping a glass of wine (or two) from their wine cellar.

Joshua Enslen, Portuguese Doctoral Graduate Student. While working in Brazil with the UGA study abroad program in the summer of 2006, Joshua presented a paper in Rio de Janeiro at a symposium sponsored by the Brazilian Studies Association (BRASA) and the Fundação Getúlio Vargas. The event, entitled BRASIL-EUA: Novas Gerações, Novos Diálogos, was the II Sympósio Internacional de História do Brasil. Mr. Enslen’s paper demonstrated how the writings of Manuel de Oliveira Lima –an important writer-diplomat of the First Republic in Brazil– represent an attempt to construct a national identity that emanated between the poles of literature and diplomacy. This paper, originally developed as part of an independent study with Dr. Iêda S. Wiarda from UGA’s School of Public and International Affairs (and later revised with the help of Dr. Susan Quinlan), was published in the Brazilian scholarly journal História, a publication of the Fundação Editora da UNESP. The title of the article is “Between Diplomacy and Letters: A Sketch of Manuel de Oliveira Lima’s Search for a Brazilian Identity.” In May 2006, before going to Brazil, Mr. Enslen also contributed another article to a publication of the City University of New York’s Graduate Center, the LL Journal. His article entitled “Feminist Prophecy: A Hypothetical Look into Gloria Anzaldúa’s La Conciencia de la Mestiza: Towards a New Consciousness and Sara Ruddick’s Maternal Thinking” investigates how both of these essays, despite their disparate foci, create mythical worlds built upon the ephemeral yet “absolute knowledge” of prophecy in order to maintain control over the polemical information contained in them. This article was developed from a paper written for Dr. Susan Quinlan and Dr. Betina Kaplan’s feminist theory class that was offered in Fall 2005.