Anna Alberni studied English Philology at the University of Barcelona. She obtained her PhD in Catalan Philology in 2003 at the same University. She has been a researcher and assistant lecturer at the University of Barcelona (1996-2000), and at the University of Girona (2005-2009). From 2003 to 2005 she was a postdoc researcher at the University of Rome-La Sapienza and at the University of L’Aquila. In 2005 she accepted an ICREA Junior position at the University of Girona. In 2009 she moved to the University of Barcelona, where she is ICREA Research Professor at the Department of Linguistics and Catalan Philology–IRCVM. 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. Linguistic Codification and Construction of a Literary Canon in the Crown of Aragon.

Research interests

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 intellectual background in which the literary culture of modern Europe is deeply rooted. More specifically, she works on issues of poetic genre, intertextuality, discoursive traditions and textual criticism. 

Alberni's new project is Ioculator seu Mimus. Performing Music and Poetry in Medieval Iberia (ERC-CoG-2017). The aim of MiMus is to transform our understanding of medieval poetry and music by establishing a corpus of archive records of unprecedented size and breath on the lives and careers of the minstrels who performed in the Crown of Aragon from the mid 13^th to the mid 15^th centuries. This new data will shed crucial light on the literary and musical repertories circulating in the South of Europe in the late medieval period.