Dr. Mary Franklin Brown

Biography

Mary Franklin-Brown studies medieval writing in French, Occitan, Latin, and Catalan. She interprets texts through dual lenses of medieval philosophy and current critical thought, considering the material transmission of texts and their performance in manuscript form. Her notable work includes 'Reading the World: Encyclopedic Writing in the Scholastic Age', published by the University of Chicago Press in 2012, which explores Foucauldian archaeology of medieval encyclopaedias and earned her the Harry Levin Prize from the American Comparative Literature Association. Franklin-Brown is engaged in large research projects, including a book titled 'Time and Lyric', examining conceptions of time in the twelfth century, interweaving analysis of erudite Latin poetry with studies of the quadrivium, calendars, and humanist commentaries to create a new theory of lyric form. Additionally, she is working on a project titled 'Poetry, Politics, Community', which interprets vernacular poetry from the eleventh and twelfth centuries through recent theories of human community. Franklin-Brown completed her A.B. and A.M. degrees at Dartmouth College and earned her PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley. She is a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and has taught at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, before moving to Cambridge. With considerable experience in archival research in France, she has also served as president of the International Medieval Society in Paris, and she is open to inquiries from potential MPhil and PhD students whose research interests align with hers.

Research Interests

Experience