Marisa Galvez

Professor of French and Italian

Professor, by courtesy, of German Studies and of Comparative Literature

Director, French and Italian (Autumn 2026)

Director, Structured Liberal Education

Ph.D., Comparative Literature, Stanford University

B.A., French, Yale University

Links

Interview with Robert Harrison on Troubadour Poetry (Entitled Opinions)

New Yorker Video Interview: Annals of Obsession on Crystal

SLE documentary

"Dark Transparencies: Crystal Poetics in Medieval Texts and Beyond"

Troubadour Lyric in a Global Poetics: Creating Worlds Through Desire

Marisa Galvez specializes in the literature of the Middle Ages in France and Western Europe, especially the poetry and narrative literature written in Occitan and Old French. Her areas of interest include the troubadours, vernacular poetics, the intersection of performance and literary cultures, and the critical history of medieval studies as a discipline. At Stanford, she currently teaches courses on medieval and Renaissance French literature and love lyric, as well as interdisciplinary upper level courses on the medieval imaginary in modern literature, film, and art. Her research covers the field of transhistorical comparative poetics. She currently serves as the Faculty Director of the The Stanford Center for Poetics and The Program for Structured Liberal Education (SLE).

Her forthcoming book, Before the Global South: Unthinking Medieval Poetry (University of Chicago Press, Fall 2026) explores how an eclectic array of contemporary poets, artists, and writers (Augusto de Campos, Édouard Glissant, and others) reimagine medieval European lyric forms. She argues that these adaptations—what she calls "unthought medievalism"—offer a mode of inquiry that is at once scholarly, critical, and creative, a new methodology for studying intangible cultural heritages of the Global South.

Her first book, Songbook: How Lyrics Became Poetry in Medieval Europe (University of Chicago Press, 2012, awarded the John Nicholas Brown Prize from the Medieval Academy of America), treats what poetry was before the emergence of the modern category, “poetry”: that is, how vernacular songbooks of the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries shaped our modern understanding of poetry by establishing expectations of what is a poem, what is a poet, and what is lyric poetry itself. The first comparative study of songbooks, the book concerns three vernacular traditions—Occitan, Middle High German, and Castilian—and analyzes how the songbook emerged from its original performance context of oral publication, into a medium for preservation, and finally became a literary object that performs the interests of poets and readers.

Her second book, The Subject of Crusade: Lyric, Romance, and Materials, 1150-1500 (University of Chicago Press, 2020) examines how the crusader subject of vernacular literature sought to reconcile secular ideals about love and chivalry with crusade. This study places this literature in dialogue with new ideas about penance and confession that emerged from the second half of the twelfth century to the end of the thirteenth. Subject argues that poetic articulations are crucial for understanding the crusades as a complex cultural and historical phenomenon, and examines another version of speaking crusades, in which lyric, romance and materials such as tapestries, textiles, and tombstones manifest ambivalence about crusade ideals.

Other ongoing projects include:

Articles that concern the transhistorical, interdisciplinary study of crystal as metaphor, material, and object. “Dark Transparencies: Crystal Poetics in Medieval Texts and Beyond,” and more recently “Crystal Desire in Medieval Texts and Beyond” an essay in Seeking Transparency: Rock Crystals Across the Medieval Mediterranean, ed. Cynthia Hahn and Avinoam Shalem (2020) presents a complex history of crystal that sees clear quartz as shaping ideas about erotic desire in an experiential or theoretical sense.