Job title:
Assistant Professor
Department:
French
Bio/CV:
Ravenhall works on medieval French literature, premodern material and visual culture, and critical theory. He has taught classes on medieval culture, French literature and film, ecocriticism, and theories of the haptic. His first book project brings the concept of anachrony to bear on medieval manuscript culture, while his second book project rethinks the medieval (and modern) reading experience through the figure of touch. A new project is in its initial stages on what he calls the “medieval commune form,” which will reread the major formal shifts of thirteenth-century European culture through ecological and political theory.
He has also published various articles and book chapters on manuscripts, vernacular history, affective reading, tactile interactions with images, the medieval Trojan legend, the philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy, and the role of smell in devotional poetry, among other things.
Before his appointment at UC Berkeley, he served as a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Cambridge from 2021 to 2023. Prior to that he held short postdoctoral posts at Freie Universität Berlin and King's College London, where he received his PhD in French in 2020.
Role:
