I am a third-year doctoral student at New College, Oxford. My DPhil project is generously funded by the Clarendon Fund, New College, and the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages at Oxford. I hold an MA in Cultural, Intellectual, and Visual History from the Warburg Institute, and a BA in Musicology from King's College London.
My work explores the critical relationship between language and experience across monastic and courtly cultures in the long twelfth century. Through a comparative reading of Old Occitan courtly lyric and coeval monastic meditations, my doctoral research examines intersubjectivity as a central sociolinguistic motor of high medieval culture. I argue that these sources sought to foster social compliance precisely through the elicitation of individual agency, often paradoxically represented in hyperbolic forms of divergence. The discourse underpinning these texts was self-consciously grounded in the notion that social cohesion could not be achieved through collectivist rhetoric alone, but instead depended upon the institutionalisation of personal intentionality. This logic, I suggest, was fundamentally predicated on a cultural awareness of the gap between the conventionality of language and the ineffability of experience. By analysing this tension, my work aims to contribute not only to the intellectual historiography of the High Middle Ages, but also to current debates in anthropology and linguistics.
My interests include courtliness, mystical theology, scholastic thought, and Franciscan culture. I am a member of the Society for the History of Emotions, the Mystical Theology Network, and I am currently working as part of the MUSLIVE research project on the historical anthropology of high medieval French song. Although my primary field is intellectual history, my methodology draws also on literary theory, philosophical anthropology, phenomenology, ethnomusicology, and performance studies.
Outside of academia, I am a singer specialising in Renaissance and Baroque music. I currently serve as a Deputy Lay Clerk at the Choir of New College, Oxford and have performed both as a soloist and as a member of various choral institutions across Italy and the United Kingdom.
Publications:
'The Social Life of the Mystical Subject: Norms of Divergence in Saint Anselm and William IX', Contemporary Theological Explorations in Mysticism (Routledge, Forthcoming: 2027)
‘Where is the Self? The Intersectional Voice of Peire de Vic in L’autrier fui en paradis’, Musical Lives in the Mediterranean, 1100-1300: Towards an Historical Anthropology of Songs and Poetry, Vol. I (Arc Humanities Press, Forthcoming: 2027)
Teaching:
Italian Prose - Year II (Group B), Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages, 2025-2026
Conference Papers:
‘Agency and Emotion in High Medieval Monastic and Courtly Cultures’, NACHE Biennial Conference, Arizona State University, Tempe/Phoenix, 22-23 May 2026
‘High Medieval Emotion: Between Identity Transition and “Involuntary Will”’, Society for the History of Emotions Biennial Conference: “Emotions at the Limits/Borders”, UNAM, Mexico City, 28-30 October 2025
‘Where is the Self? A Dualistic Reading of L’autrier fui en paradis’, Musical Lives and Networks in the Medieval Mediterranean, 1100-1300, King’s College London, 17-18 September 2025
‘Building Community around the Mystical “I”: Intersubjective Sociality in High Medieval Monastic Meditations and Courtly Love Songs’, The Mystical Theology Network Annual Conference: “Mystical Entanglements: Communities, Networks, and the (Relational) Self in the History and Study of Mysticism”, Ruusbroec Institute, University of Antwerp, 4-6 June 2025
Prizes and Awards:
Clarendon Scholarship (Oxford, 2023-2026); Convocation Trust Bursary for high academic achievement (University of London, 2021); Purcell Prize (best degree result in Musicology, King's College London, 2020); Sambrooke Exhibition Prize (highest average result in Musicology, King's College London, 2019).