Anna Alberni studied English Philology at the University of Barcelona. She obtained her PhD in Catalan Philology in 2003 at the same University. She also holds a Diploma in Music (Piano).

She has been a researcher and assistant lecturer at the University of Barcelona (1996-2000), and at the University of Girona (2005-2009). In 2002 she enjoyed an extraordinary fellowship granted by the UB in order to finish her PhD. From 2003 to 2005 she was a postdoc researcher at the University of Rome-La Sapienza and at the University of L’Aquila (Italy).

In 2005 she accepted an ICREA Junior position at the University of Girona. In 2009 she was granted an ERC-StG and moved to the University of Barcelona, where she is ICREA Research Professor at the Department of Linguistics and Catalan Philology–IRCVM (Centre de Recerca en Cultures Medievals).

Research interests

During the last years Alberni has extensively dedicated her efforts to the consolidation of the research group created in 2009 in order to develop the ERC-StG project The Last Song of the Troubadours, carried out with the major collaboration of various European institutions. The main lines of research of this project were the edition and study of a selected corpus of Occitano-Catalan poetry drawn from witnesses that had not been studied extensively before, and the influence exerted by French 14th century poetry on late medieval Catalan literature. Some of the results of the project can be consulted in http://icalia.es/troubadours/en/.

Alberni’s research focuses on the study of medieval Catalan poetry as an essential part of Europe’s cultural past, with a particular interest on late Romance lyric collections and on how the reception of the poetic code of the troubadours shaped the mentality of courtly society by establishing an intellectual background in which the literary culture of modern Europe is deeply rooted. More specifically, she works on issues of poetic genre, codicology, intertextuality and textual criticism.