William Paden

WILLIAM PADEN, Professor of French, Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, Yale. A specialist in the Middle Ages, he is co-author with Frances Freeman Paden of Troubadour Poems from the South of France, a book of English verse translations (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 and other countries, particularly Italy and Spain. Current projects include editions of previously unpublished works in Occitan and Latin and a book on The Troubadour's Lady.

Recent articles have concerned the evolution of troubadour poetry over three centuries; poetic and social relations of troubadours and Jews; archaic Occitan texts from the tenth and eleventh centuries; troubadours and music ("What Singing Does to Words: Reflections on the Art of the Troubadours"); troubadours and Italy ("Petrarch as a Poet of Provence"); medieval poetry of Spain ("Principles of Generic Classification in the Medieval European Lyric: The Case of Galician-Portuguese"); the Occitan language; the use of rolls in contrast to codices, or manuscript books; Occitan poetry of the nineteenth century; Thomas Jefferson's interest in Occitan; and medieval film, both movies about the Middle Ages and movies that are not about that period but may be compared to medieval works.

He has delivered papers in recent years at meetings of the Association Internationale d'Etudes Occitanes (Vienna, 1999; Messina, 2002; Bordeaux, 2005); at the University of Bristol, UK (2003), and the Otto-Friedrich-Universität, Bamberg, Germany (2005); and at the Medieval Academy of America, the International Congress on Medieval Studies (Kalamazoo), the Mountain Interstate Foreign Language Conference, the College English Association, the Illinois Medieval Association, the Sewanee Medieval Colloquium, the Conference on Medievalism, the American Literature Association Symposium, the Kentucky Foreign Language Conference, the Southeastern Medieval Association, Loyola University-Chicago, and the Newberry Library.

He has received two Fellowships from the NEH, and directed an NEH Institute on medieval lyric poetry in 1995. He serves on the advisory councils of Exemplaria and Tenso, published by the Société Guilhem IX (the American society for troubadour studies), of which he has been Vice-President and President.

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