Department of French and Italian

• Medieval French and Occitan literature, particularly lyric and romance
• Relationship between text and music
• Medieval manuscripts, book history, paleography and codicology, manuscript fragments
• Medievalism, reception of the Middle Ages, history of Medieval Studies

My work primarily concerns medieval French and Occitan lyric composed in the 12th and 13th centuries and transmitted in manuscripts copied in the 13th and 14th centuries. My research explores notions of authorship and the relationship between lyric texts and melodies. I investigate the fundamental tension between song as a constantly evolving performed art,  and as a fixed, written text, including the different manuscript contexts of song. On this last point, my work on lyric intersects with my other main research focus: medieval manuscripts and the history of the book. I am a paleographer of both Latin and vernacular writing systems and a codicologist studying the construction and production of medieval manuscript and early print books. I am particularly interested in manuscript fragments, and in using digital tools and methods to virtually reassemble books that have been dismantled and libraries that have been dispersed.

My first book, Manuscripts and the Making of the Troubadours, is a study of troubadour song as it survives in all manuscript sources, which are more numerous than generally reported. The book shows that lesser-studied manuscripts challenge traditional notions of lyric authorship by demonstrating the extent to which these notions are rooted in the study of one kind of manuscript: the songbook. I am also preparing a new catalogue of troubadour lyric manuscripts that offers a revised and updated account of all known sources for this tradition.

At IU, I direct the Book Lab [please add link: https://booklab.indiana.edu], a research, teaching, and outreach center focused on book history and book arts. The Book Lab was awarded a 2024 National Endowment for the Humanities – Humanities Initiatives at Colleges and Universities grant to develop a new interdisciplinary minor in Book Studies.

I am also the Principal Investigator of the Peripheral Manuscripts Project  [please add link: https://peripheralmss.org], which works to digitize and describe manuscript collections across the Midwestern United States. PMP is funded by a 2025–2028 National Endowment for the Humanities Humanities Collections and Reference Resources Grant. The project was previously funded by a Council on Library and Information Resources Digitizing Hidden Collections Grant from 2020–2024. Our project repository (currently in beta) is viewable here: https://go.iu.edu/peripheralmss.

Articles and book chapters

• “In situ Fragments in Beinecke Library Incunabula,” Fragmentology, vol.  8 (2025): 127–153.
• “Napoleon’s Troubadours,” in Troubadour Texts and Contexts: Essays in Honor of Wendy Pfeffer, ed. Sarah-Grace Heller, Courtney J. Wells and Lisa Bevevino. Gallica series. D.S. Brewer, 2024: 139–161.
• “Ege in Muskegon: Broken Books in the Peripheral Manuscripts Project,” Digital Philology, vol. 13, no. 1 (Spring 2024): 54–68.
• “The Problem with Troubadour Melody Attribution,” Occitània. Centres e periferias / Centri e periferie. Atti del XIII Convegno dell’Association Internationale d’Études Occitanes (Cuneo, 12-17 luglio 2021), ed. Andrea Giraudo, Walter Meliga, Giuseppe Noto, Aline Pons, and Matteo Rivoira. Edizioni dell’Orso, 2024: 241–252.
• Sarah Noonan, Elizabeth K. Hebbard, Michelle Dalmau, and Ian Cornelius, “Regional Collaboration and the Peripheral Manuscripts Project,” Journal of the Early Book Society, vol. 26 (2023): 195–207.
• “The Peripheral Manuscripts Project: Must-Sees in the Midwest,” Manuscript Studies, vol. 8, no. 2 (Fall 2023): 311–328.
• Laura Morreale et al., “Transcribing “Le Pèlerinage de Damoiselle Sapience”:  Scholarly Editing Covid19-Style,” Digital Medievalist, vol. 15, no. 1 (2022).
• “Troubadours and Trouvères,” Oxford Bibliographies in Music. Co-authored with Ardis Butterfield. Published April 21, 2021.
• “Thibaut de Champagne and the Troubadours,” Tenso, vol. 36 (2021): 77–110.

• F225 : Scenes from the South of France
• F225 : The Bayeux Tapestry from Scratch (in the ASURE program)
• F225 : The Book Lab (in the ASURE program)
• F300 : La littérature française à l’opéra
• F300: La femme fatale / Dangerous Women
• F361: La France médiévale
• F410: Légendes d’Arthur
• F451: Notre-Dame de Paris
• F501: Survey of Medieval French Literature
• F615: Lyric Traditions of the Medieval Mediterranean
• F615: Medieval Manuscripts
• F615 : The Troubadours
• COLL-S103 : AD FONTES / Back to the Sources (in the Intensive Freshmen Seminar program)
• COLL-X101: Introduction to Book Studies

• 2026–2029 Mellon Foundation New Directions Fellow
• 2026 Outstanding Junior Faculty Award, Indiana University Bloomington
• 2024 Indiana University Trustees Teaching Award
• 2023 Presidential Arts & Humanities Fellow
• 2022 IU College Arts and Humanities Institute Research Fellow