Sarah Kay
Department/Program(s):
Position: Professor
Title: Professor of French and Italian. Chair, Department of French and Italian.
Office: 316 East Pyne
Phone: 609-258-4559
Email: sarahkay@princeton.edu
Office Hours: MTh 4-6
Profile
Sarah Kay is Professor of French and a specialist in medieval French and Occitan literature. She was trained at the University of Oxford in the UK, and taught at the Universities of Liverpool and Cambridge. At Cambridge she was head of the department of French (1996-2001) and Director of Graduate Studies (2003-5); she was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2004, awarded the degree of Litt.D (Cambridge) in 2005, and admitted as Chevalier dans l’Ordre des palmes académiques in 2006. Her major publications are an edition of Raoul de Cambrai and four monographs on various aspects of medieval literature of which the most recent is The Place of Thought. The Complexity of One in Late Medieval French Didactic Poetry (UPenn Press, 2007). She also co-edited a number of books including, with Simon Gaunt, The Troubadours. An Introduction (Cambridge, 1999) and The Cambridge Companion to Medieval French Literature (Cambridge, 2008). With Malcolm Bowie and Terence Cave she co-wrote A Short History of French Literature (Oxford, 2003). Her interest in modern thought and theory lead her in 2003 to publish the first monograph in English on the work of Slavoj Zizek. She joined the department of French and Italian at Princeton in 2006 and has never regretted it for a moment.
Sarah Kay is Professor of French and a specialist in medieval French and Occitan literature. She was trained at the University of Oxford in the UK, and taught at the Universities of Liverpool and Cambridge. At Cambridge she was head of the department of French (1996-2001) and Director of Graduate Studies (2003-5); she was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2004, awarded the degree of Litt.D (Cambridge) in 2005, and admitted as Chevalier dans l’Ordre des palmes académiques in 2006. Her major publications are an edition of Raoul de Cambrai and four monographs on various aspects of medieval literature of which the most recent is The Place of Thought. The Complexity of One in Late Medieval French Didactic Poetry (UPenn Press, 2007). She also co-edited a number of books including, with Simon Gaunt, The Troubadours. An Introduction (Cambridge, 1999) and The Cambridge Companion to Medieval French Literature (Cambridge, 2008). With Malcolm Bowie and Terence Cave she co-wrote A Short History of French Literature (Oxford, 2003). Her interest in modern thought and theory lead her in 2003 to publish the first monograph in English on the work of Slavoj Zizek. She joined the department of French and Italian at Princeton in 2006 and has never regretted it for a moment.
Teaching Interests
At undergraduate level, her main contribution to FIT provision is to teach FRE 321, a course on the French Middle Ages whose content varies from year to year; she also sometimes offers FRE 200-level classes, and FRE 401 (French critical theory). She teaches a range of graduate courses: FRE 506 offers broad coverage of medieval French literature; FRE 510 specializes on a specific topic involving medieval French literature (e.g. “Cosmology and melancholy”); FRE 509 is a course on Occitan literature from the troubadours onwards; and FRE 583 can be taught as a course on philology and text editing.
Current projects
Her current research is on the relationship between poetry and knowledge in late medieval France, a 4-year collaborative project funded by the British Arts and Humanities Research Council (for more information see http://www.mml.cam.ac.uk/french/poeticknowledge/ ). Two books are in progress: one on the influence of quotations from the troubadours on the development of the European lyric and the other, co-written with Adrian Armstrong, synthesizing the results of the research project as a whole.
