Anna Alberni

Anna Alberni

Universitat de Barcelona

Humanities

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.


Research interests

Alberni’s research focuses on the study of medieval Romance poetry as an essential part of Europe’s cultural past. More specifically, she works on issues of poetic genre, intertextuality, discoursive traditions and textual criticism. During the last years Alberni has extensively dedicated her efforts to the consolidation of the research group created in 2009 in order to develop her project The Last Song of the Troubadours. Linguistic Codification and Construction of a Literary Canon in the Crown of Aragon (ERC-StG-2008). Her actual research project, Ioculator seu Mimus. Performing Music and Poetry in Medieval Iberia (ERC-CoG-2017), intends to transform our understanding of medieval Romance 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 13th to the mid 15th 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.

Selected publications

Alberni A 2019, ‘Guillaume de Machaut at the court of Aragon, 1380-1430’, in Digital Philology: A Journal of Medieval Cultures, 7.2, Special Issue, Kevin Brownlee and Marta Marfany (ed), pp. 173-190.


Selected research activities

  • Organization of the XXVII Congrés de l’Associació Hispànica de Literatura Medieval (Universitat de Barcelona, 2-6 September 2019)
  • Organization of the Panel “Performing Music and Poetry in Medieval Iberia: a Reassessment”, XVI Congress of the International Courtly Literature Society (University of Exeter, 22-26 July 2019)

Papers delivered in the following conferences:

  • “King Peter the Ceremonious, the Royal Chapel and the Papal Court at Avignon: imitation of a secular or of a religious power?” (with Stefano M. Cingolani), MALMECC Study Day Avignon as transcultural hub (University of Oxford, St. Luke’s Chapel, 9 February 2019)
  • “Lingua poetica e tradizione manoscritta nella lirica catalana medievale”, Forme dell’innovazione linguistica nelle tradizioni manoscritte romanze medievali (Università degli Studi di Milano, 9-10 May 2019)
  • “Cultural encounters and intertextuality: the role of minstrels in medieval Catalan poetry”, XVI Congress of the International Courtly Literature Society (University of Exeter, 22-26 July 2019)
  • “Músics i joglars a la Corona d’Aragó medieval: una base de dades interrogable (MiMus)” (with Anna Fernàndez-Clot), XXVII Congrés de l’Associació Hispànica de Literatura Medieval (Universitat de Barcelona, 2-6 September 2019)
  • “Minstrels and poets in the Crown of Aragon: a digital database (with Anna Fernàndez-Clot)”, MALMECC Conference Music and Late Medieval European Court Cultures (University of Oxford, 26-27 September 2019)
  • “MiMus DB. Giullari e menestrelli nella Corona d’Aragona medievale”, Eurythmia. Formae e rituali coreutici tra Medioevo e Rinascimento (Università di Bologna-Ravenna, 10 December 2019)