Eliza Zinngesser

I’m currently at work on two book projects. The first, Lovebirds: Avian Erotic Entanglements in Medieval French and Occitan Literature, is about how birds, rather than being mere “symbols” of love, performed actual work with respect to the erotic experience. In each chapter, I turn to a different confluence of birds and human subjects (confluences I propose to call “entanglements”) and to what those confluences enabled erotically. In an introduction, I trace the history of the association between birds and love back to classical antiquity but also forward, showing that it endures to this day in our contemporary erotic vocabulary and imaginary. In the rest of the book, I argue that human-avian entanglements made possible: a type of language that foregrounds the corporeal and sensorial over the semantic (chapter 1, “Pidgin Poetics”), erotic affects such as desire and pleasure (chapter 2, “The Wings of Desire”), the pivoting of love objects (chapter 3, “The Falcon as Fulcrum”), and memory of the love object (chapter 4, “Mnemonic Birds”). In a coda, I explore how metamorphosis into a bird seems to be a requisite condition for physical erotic contact, and especially for procreation, in much medieval literature.

My second book project concerns plant grafting and the way in which it became a way to think through different models of temporality and queer parturition.

I’m also the author of Stolen Song: How the Troubadours Became French (Cornell University Press, 2020), which documented for the first time the act of cultural appropriation that created a founding moment for French literary history: the rescripting and domestication of troubadour song, a prestige corpus in the European sphere, as French, and the simultaneous creation of an alternative point of origin for French literary history—a body of faux-archaic Occitanizing song.