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So how did a Tennessee girl born to a Colombian mother and an Appalachian father end up in Eugene, Oregon in the Pacific Northwest of the United States?  It's simple; my life is the product of studying Romance Languages and Literatures.  My father was the first person to go to High School in his family.  When he happened into a Spanish HS class he suddenly became aware of how grand the world was.  There were places where people communicated using different sounds, ate different foods, held different beliefs. There was a place where people lived a life not at all like the one his family had. He wanted to explore that and made the startling choice to go to college and study Spanish despite his family's inability to understand.  A Spanish HS class took a boy out of Appalachia to put him on a college campus and then in a remote town in Colombia.  He eventually met my mother, wrote a thesis on the influence of French Enlightenment thinking on the revolutionaries of Nueva Granada, and became a professor of Spanish.

Given this background I had no choice but to foment my own revolution. At the age of 4, I pronounced that I would live in Paris when I grew up.  Then I decided on a career as a French Literature Professor and in High school engaged enthusiastically in all things French.  But in college I couldn't turn my back on Spanish. In fact, things were about to become even more complicated thanks to the survey courses Romance Studies students are required so often to take.  While taking the French and Spanish surveys we hit upon the kharjas in my Spanish class and the troubadours in my French class at the same time.  The kharjas blew my mind: love poetry sweet enough to appeal to a teenage girl written in Arabic or Hebrew script but with the sounds of Spanish when pronounced aloud at the end of a more serious poem in formal Arabic or Hebrew.  Appeals to the mother and to girlfriends in Spanish while the formal bit was in a different, formal language.  Bilingual poetry that, like me, chose one language for la mamita and another for non-intimates.  The kharjas spoke my language.  At the same time its theme, an intense and refining love, was being spoken in yet another language across the hall in my French class that was studying troubadour songs.  Just like our program and campus here at the University of Oregon, my language department was mapped not so differently than the world I was studying.  I felt myself to be in the midst of the mystery on that campus in Middle Tennessee and centuries beyond the Middle Ages.  I had to tease out these strands that seemed to be knotting together all these spaces Semitic and Romance along the Mediterranean while weaving me, my life and experience of language and situation in the world into the tangle.  

After going to graduate school in Comparative Literature, studying Occitan at the Sorbonne in France, and teaching university in Barcelona I am prepared for making new worlds my home.  now in an equally-exciting new world: Eugene, Oregon.  The community of faculty and students at the University of Oregon has already pushed my thinking beyond boundaries that needed trespassing.  The insistence on a collaboration between literary scholars and musicologists demonstrated by the course offered by Gina Psaki of Romance Languages and the word-renowned performer Anne Azéma in Spring 2012 is a lesson I hope to have brought to my own course on Troubadour Studies.  As I so often do, I held many sessions of the course in the library to allow us to get lost in the material manifestations of medieval lyric: the books. To ensure a sound musicological dimension was incorporated into the course all sessions involved listening to performances and discussing the issues musicologists study.  I had the privilege of inviting Roger Grant from the School of Music for a discussion of manuscript transmission and performance.   With the patient students of my Medieval Love and Troubadour classes last year helping my thinking I am presently toying with the idea that if we pull back the lens to view the linguistic and literary evolution of kharja to troubadour tradition so as to see the full landscape of the Romance Mediterranean we might better understand many of the mysteries of the birth of romance lyric and its first two centuries of migration and strange transmogrification.  The importance of a remapping of Medieval Mediterranean identities has become my central concern.
It is my contention that the study of discrete literary or artistic traditions of particular parts of the medieval  Mediterranean have yet to be examined with consideration of the particularly transcultural nature of the region.  Early in its inception the idea that there was an "Arabic influence" that shaped Western literature was dubbed the "Oriental Hypothesis." It was hotly debated. And then, it petered out and disappeared, perhaps in no small part due to Maria Rosa Menocal's book, The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History published in the late 80s just as I was about to take those fateful undergrad classes that so obviously conveyed her thinking.  In 2008 I participated in an NEH Summer Seminar, The Medieval Mediterranean, run by Sharon Kinoshita and Brian Catlos in Barcelona.  The experience allowed me to learn a lot from the historians in the group. It also gave all of us the chance to reflect on the issues relating to studying pieces of the Mediterranean.  While there I asked Maria Rosa Menocal and Ross Brann, scholar of the Jewish literature of Iberia what ever happened to the "thèse oriental."  He couldn't say.  It is just not a provable or deniable thesis. It simply grew uninteresting, he contended.  

It is the case that the question of influence is no longer a matter of discussion; it seems most are willing to accept that there must have been exchange between peoples despite distance and difference. However, what is odd to me is that the study of literature did not shift to accommodate a more dynamic, intercultural, and fluid concept of peoples and literary production.  The discussion of medieval literatures remain burdened by the idea and names of present-day nations so that articles and books still speak of "Medieval Spain" or troubadours from "the south of France."  In two recent talks I took on the question of whether we can get at the way our subjects may have self-identified.  My courses on Love in Medieval Iberia and The Wandering Troubadours helped me prepare these talks which I am converting into three articles.  One article provides a historiographical study of the way the literatures of Occitania are discussed in an anachronistic way by nineteenth and twentieth-century literary historians who treat it as though it was produced by people with a consciousness of a French nation and even a sense of being French themselves. A second article asks the textual remains from the courts and towns of Occitania, the county of Barcelona, and the Crown of Aragon how identity worked for those caught up in the slippery knot of these, at times, overlapping entities.  This second article gets at this sense of identity by examining one element often employed in the construction of an identity: language.  The article tracks the use of language names as well as the ideas everyday citizens and authors had about language and the different lengas they encountered.  Eventually I will work on a third article that will show that the study of troubadour songs can change when we think of these poets as people with a very different identity than the one medievalists unwittingly foisted upon them.

While I have chosen to write a book on a single author, the easy migration of theories of language and literature throughout the Mediterranean remains of primary concern.  The first textbook for the study of a Romance language was written by a figure who exemplifies the fluidity of the medieval Mediterranean.  Raimon Vidal de Besalú (ca. late XIIth early XIIIth c.) was from Besalú, a village within the Catalan counties by then a part of the unified Crown of Aragon.  He writes a text that has been called a grammar, not of his maternal tongue, Catalan, but of Occitan.  This Catalan troubadour does not sit still within today's borders, generic or geographic.  His text was deemed a failure of a grammar when in fact, as I demonstrated at the Association internationale d'études Occitanes, the Razos de trobar was written as a practical guide to teach its reader how to sing songs in the troubadour style.  As such it cobbles together various ars to provide a complete compendium for the would-be troubadour.  It is not a bad grammar but a text that moves between genres, a way of writing that is as much a way of being for this author who wrote hybrid texts, narrative novas that quoted troubadour lyric passages. Raimon Vidal's Razos refers to the distinctions between Catalan and Occitan suggesting that both can be spoken by the same person in different instances. The ars also explains that different genres call for the use of different languages when composing literature.  The novas seek to show the audience how to live within this complex linguistic world with one nova offering lessons to the joglar and another to lovers.  This shows the modern reader to what extent linguistic fluidity was the norm for this author. The popularity of his works suggest it was a norm familiar to his public as well.  

Raimon Vidal de Besalù, the author of the first Romance grammar, suggests that one learns by observing, reflecting and judging.  The end of this path is knowledge.  The pedagogy of this medieval Catalan troubadour has influenced my own.  My goal is to bring the practices of observation and discernment to consciousness so as to allow for these habits to be strengthened and refined.  

In order to convey this philosophy of learning to my students I allow them to consider and comment on their own notions of all the elements involved in their education.  This has been particularly invaluable to me as I have taught in a number of different settings in the United States and abroad.  I have learned from time abroad that our assumptions about learning and teaching play a large role in the workings of a classroom.  In Europe, students work hard to capture every last word spoken as the professor lectures before the class.  This scene implies certain ideas about knowledge, about the course material, and about learning itself.  The active or engaged learning popular today in the Americas says something else about learning and teaching.  I try to bring these underlying ideas to the fore.  

When teaching beginning language classes I remind students that they have already successfully mastered the acquisition of a language and ask them to reflect on that experience and the similarities and differences they expect to find in learning a language in the classroom.  Because I speak only in the target language in the classroom this discussion is usually done online in English.  If I am teaching literature I ask them to define literature on their own, in writing.  It always starts the semester off with a bang. As Augustine says of time, everyone always seems to have an idea of what it is until asked to define it.  Depending on the group dynamic I may or may not project on the board famous authors' answers to the question "What is literature?" or "Why write?"

The question inevitably draws us into a discussion of language and types of discourse but also questions of cultural identity and values.  In the first day the students have set the general parameters of enquiry for the rest of the semester.  My role is to model how best to pursue the questions that haunt us; to demonstrate the pleasure and satisfying products of rigor; and to point out the network— of which we are all a part—of resources available to one who wants to pursue knowledge.  It is also important to me that students see others, adults, famous and important figures, stirred by curiosity. I want them to see that this is how we humans learn and grow.