Anita Savo

Research and Teaching

Anita Savo teaches courses on medieval Iberian literatures and cultures, with an emphasis on cross-cultural exchange among Christians, Jews and Muslims. She also teaches in BU’s MFA program in Literary Translation. Her research explores how medieval literature transmits ideas about identity and authority; how the paradigms of Iberian Studies and Mediterranean Studies can help us rethink the Spanish literary canon; and the ways that early books and manuscripts shed light on medieval literary culture.

Savo’s first book, Portraying Authorship: Juan Manuel and the Rhetoric of Authority (U of Toronto P, 2024), tracks the emergence of a concept of authorship in medieval Castilian literature through a study of the literary career of fourteenth-century nobleman Juan Manuel. The book shows how Juan Manuel convincingly positioned himself as an author, despite lacking what his contemporaries would consider the proper credentials. She is also co-editing A Companion to Don Juan Manuel (forthcoming with Brill), a volume of essays that situates Juan Manuel and his works in their Iberian and Mediterranean contexts. She is currently working on a book titled Algarabía: Language Anxiety in Medieval Castile, which investigates how Christian Castilian writers reshaped the cultural legacy of Arabic in Spain through their depictions of the language and its speakers. Her publications include articles and book chapters on representations of Blackness in medieval Iberian literature; gender and the exemplum tradition; religious polemic in Juan Manuel; translation and pseudotranslation in the Poema de Alfonso Onceno; and nineteenth-century editions of medieval texts.

Selected Publications

Savo, Anita. (2024) Portraying Authorship: Juan Manuel and the Rhetoric of Authority. University of Toronto Press.