Professor Simon Gaunt FBA

Biography

• BA Warwick (1982); PhD Warwick (1986)
• Research Fellow, Downing College, Cambridge (1986-88)
• Lecturer at University of Cambridge and Fellow of St Catharine’s College (1988-98)
• Professor of French Language and Literature, King's College London, from 1998, Head of Department 1998-2004
• Fellow of King's College London, from 2015
• Honorary Fellow of St Catharine's College, Cambridge, from 2016
• Fellow of the British Academy, from 2018

Research Interests and PhD Supervision

• Old French literature
• Medieval Occitan literature
• Textual criticism (editing medieval texts)
• Modern critical theory

Simon Gaunt's main research interests are: Old French literature; medieval Occitan literature; textual criticism (editing medieval texts); modern critical theory. He has worked on a wide range of twelfth- and thirteenth-century texts, including troubadour lyric, chansons de geste, verse and prose courtly romance, fabliaux, beast epic, hagiography, the Roman de la Rose and medieval travel literature. He is particularly interested in theoretically oriented approaches to medieval literature and textual criticism, notably in relation to feminism and queer theory, Marxism, psychoanalysis, anthropology and postcolonial theory. His most recent books are Marco Polo's Le Devisement du Monde: Narrative Voice, Language and Diversity (Boydell and Brewer, 2013) and (with Karen Pratt) The Song of Roland and other Poems of Charlemagne (OUP, 2016). He was PI on the AHRC-funded project Medieval Francophone Literary Culture Outside France, see http://www.medievalfrancophone.ac.uk/, and is currently PI on the ERC-funded project The Values of French, see http://www.tvof.ac.uk/.

Topics on which Simon Gaunt has supervised PhD theses include: Occitan satire, verse romance compilations, community in saints’  lives, cyclical narratives, the continuations to Chrétien de Troyes’ Conte du graal, medieval debate poetry, medieval translation, and the mobility of medieval lyric.

For more details please see his full research profile.

Teaching

Simon Gaunt teaches classes on medieval French and Occitan literature; critical theory, particularly feminism, queer theory, poststructuralism, and psychoanalysis; 19th- and 20th-c. French literature.

Expertise and Public Engagement

• President of the Society for French Studies 2006-2008
• Editorial/ Advisory Boards: Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature, Comparative Literature (1998-2008), Florigium, French Studies, Journal of Romance Studies, Medioevo Romanzo, Oxford Dictionary of the Middle Ages (1998-2009)
• PI on AHRC-funded project: Medieval French Literary Culture Outside France 2011-14
• Member of REF2014 sub-panel 28, Modern Language
• PI on the ERC-funded project: The Values of French Language and Literature in the European Middle Ages (2015-2020)
• Member of REF2021 subpanel 26