Professor Emily Francomano wins NEH grant for Scholarly Editions and Translations

The Global Medieval Studies Program is pleased to congratulate Professor Emily Francomano , Professor and Chair of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, on winning a prestigious NEH Scholarly Editions and Translations Grant!

This is cause for celebration for another reason as well: Professor Francomano’s collaborator for this project, Dr. Clara Pascual-Argente, who is now an Associate Professor at Rhodes College, received her Ph.D. from Georgetown’s Department of Spanish and Portuguese.

The project, The Story of Apollonius of Tyre: An Edition and Translation of Two Medieval Iberian Texts, entails the preparation of a critical edition and translation of two medieval Iberian texts: the 13th-century verse romance Libro de Apolonio (Book of Apollonius) and the Vida e historia del rey illustrated with 35 German woodcuts.

The late antique romance of Apollonius of Tyre is central to the pre-modern literary imagination. Fictional king Apollonius loses and gains lands, riches, and family members across the Mediterranean in a series of twists and turns that riveted medieval audiences in Latin and vernacular languages. Emily Francomano and Clara Pascual-Argente are editing and translating the Libro de Apolonio, a masterpiece of medieval European romance little known beyond the confines of Iberian literary history, and the fifteenth-century Vida e historia del rey Apolonio, in which the same story is reshaped in print for humanist tastes. As the importance of medieval Iberia to the formation of European and Mediterranean cultures becomes increasingly recognized, these versions remain particularly relevant to our understanding of medieval vernacular reception and transformation of ancient culture.

For more on the varieties of grants offered by the National Endowment for the Humanities, click here .

Congratulations, Professor Francomano!