William Paden

William Paden, Professor Emeritus of French, Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, Yale. A specialist in literature of the Middle Ages, he is co-editor with the late Mario Trovato of a 13th century philosophical treatise in Latin, Guillelmus de Aragonia, De Nobilitate Animi (forthcoming); co-author with Frances Freeman Paden of a book of English verse translations, Troubadour Poems from the South of France (2007); author of An Introduction to Old Occitan (1998); editor of essay collections on Medieval Lyric: Genres in Historical Context (2000), The Future of the Middle Ages: Medieval Literature in the 1990s (1994), and The Voice of the Trobairitz: Perspectives on the Women Troubadours (1989); editor of The Medieval Pastourelle (1987); and co-editor of The Poems of the Troubadour Bertran de Born (1986). His research and teaching interests include the troubadours and medieval poetry of France, Italy, and Spain. He was awarded a Mellon Emeritus Fellowship, 2011, for a project on "Love and Marriage in the Time of the Troubadours."

Forthcoming articles concern troubadour studies in Italy as seen in an American perspective; the music of thirteenth-century secular lyric in Galician-Portuguese; an entry on Virgil in Occitan literature for The Virgil Encyclopedia; and revised articles on several Occitan topics for the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Recent articles include "Swollen Woman, Shifting Canon: The Birth of Occitan Poetry," with Frances Freeman Paden, in PMLA (2010); "Lyrics on Rolls," on poetry in several languages transmitted on rolls or scrolls; an edition of a book of Latin proverbs; a study of several films as hagiography; and two articles on aspects of Ezra Pound's use of the troubadours.

He has delivered papers in recent years at meetings of the Association Internationale d'Etudes Occitanes in Vienna, Messina, and Bordeaux; at meetings of other associations in Limoges, London, and Hautefort; and at the International Congress on Medieval Studies (Western Michigan University), the University of North Texas, and the University of New Mexico. He has received two Fellowships from the NEH, and directed an NEH Institute on medieval lyric poetry. He has served on the editorial boards of Exemplaria, PMLA, and Romance Philology, and is currently on the boards of Rialto: Repertorio informatizzato dell’antica letteratura trobadorica e occitana (Italy); Mot so razo (Spain); and Tenso, published by the American society for troubadour studies, the Société Guilhem IX, which he has served as Vice-President and President. He is a Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Palmes Académiques.

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