Anita Savo

Research and Teaching

Anita Savo is a scholar and teacher of medieval Iberian literatures and cultures, with an emphasis on cross-cultural exchange among Christians, Jews and Muslims. She also teaches periodically in BU’s MFA program in Literary Translation. Her research explores three key themes: first, how medieval literature can transmit ideas about identity and authority; second, how the paradigms of Iberian Studies and Mediterranean Studies can help us rethink the Spanish literary canon; and third, how early books and manuscripts can shed light on medieval literary culture.

Professor Savo’s award-winning 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 the literary career of fourteenth-century nobleman Juan Manuel. She is also co-editor of A Companion to Don Juan Manuel (forthcoming with Brill in 2026), a volume of essays that situates Juan Manuel and his works in their Iberian and Mediterranean contexts. She is currently working on a second book titled Algarabía: Language Anxiety in Medieval Castile, which examines attitudes towards Arabic in medieval Castile through literary representations of the language and its speakers, including a corpus of Arabic proverbs and poems transliterated in the Latin alphabet. Algarabía proposes that medieval Castilian writers used these depictions to reshape the cultural legacy of Arabic in Spain, a legacy with lasting impact from the early modern period to today.

Professor Savo has published articles and book chapters on race, gender, and religion in medieval Iberian literature. Her work has been generously supported by the Medieval Academy of America, the Pskowski Junior Faculty Research Fund, and the BU Center for the Humanities

Selected Publications

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