Hannah Weaver

As a medievalist in Harvard’s department of Romance Languages and Literatures, I primarily focus on early writing in French – much of which paradoxically comes out of Francophone England. My thesis project focuses on the instability of the past in twelfth- and thirteenth-century French and English historiographical manuscripts, with a special focus on the Brut tradition. Examining large-scale interpolations, hapax illustration programs, and irresolvable differences between manuscripts of equal authority, the project tracks how Britain’s past becomes a site of temporal experimentation and fertile creativity across this period. I also have strong interest in translation studies, questions of genre, and memory studies.

My articles on the uses and revisions of stories about the past have appeared in Viator, Arthuriana, and Manuscript Studies and I have an article forthcoming at the Harvard Library Bulletin. An article drawn from the dissertation is currently under review. I've also written a guest blog post about interpolations in a manuscript of the Histoire ancienne jusqu'à César for Simon Gaunt's The Values of French project. In 2018, I co-convened an international conference on Recycling, Revision, and Relocation in the Middle Ages, out of which a special issue of The Medieval Globe is in the works (publication expected in 2019).

In 2018–2019, I will be a visiting student at both the École des Chartes and the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. In 2017, I worked as a Harvard Library Pforzheimer Fellow on the Beyond Words project at the Houghton Library. You can read more about my activities on the Houghton Library Blog.

I am originally from the Midwest. After graduating from Boston University in 2009, summa cum laude, I taught French at public and private schools in the suburbs of Boston before deciding to pursue graduate work at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Medieval Studies (M.A. 2014) and subsequently at Harvard.

For more details about publications, teaching, and conferences, please see attached CV. Feel free to contact me about my research.