Dr Francesca Petrizzo
- REF Coordinator (Science & Engineering College Research Administration)
- Affiliate (History)
Biography
After a BA at Oxford in 2013 and an MA at University College London in 2014, I moved to Leeds for a thesis on the kin networks of the Normans in the Mediterranean which I was awarded in 2018. I was then awarded a Leverhulme Study Abroad postdoctoral grant, which I undertook at the Università di Roma Tor Vergata (Italy) between 2018 and 2019, for the project ‘Tancred: The Lives and Afterlives of a Hauteville Crusader.’ The project focused on Tancred, a Southern Norman and youngest of the leaders of the First Crusade, his biography and his rich cultural afterlife as a model of crusader heroism. This resulted in a monograph under contract for the Routledge Rulers of the Latin East series. In 2019 I returned to Leeds, where I taught during the pandemic, before joining Glasgow in January 2023.
Research interests
I am a scholar of masculinity, identity and culture at war in the Mediterranean in the central Middle Ages, and in global medievalism (the survival and appropriation of medieval imagery) from the Renaissance to the modern day. I focus on practitioners of violence and their use of extraordinary pasts to legitimise themselves, on the family as unit of cultural production and seat on the making of identity, and on the use of medievalism by political entities ranging from Renaissance polities to 20th and 21st century insurgent groups. I am an interdisciplinary scholar, who uses documentary, literary, art historical and material sources, ranging from traditional to innovative historiographical methods, from military history and prosopography to gender and literary studies and the history of emotions. I am committed to the study of sources in the primary language, as shown by my work as a Latinist and with Greek sources.
