Jack Nunn

I am Departmental Lecturer in Medieval French and Organising Tutor at St Peter’s College. In the 2024–25 academic year, I was a Visiting Scholar in the Department of History at Princeton University, where I held the Daniel M. Sachs Class of 1960 Graduating Scholarship.

Outreach and widening participation are central to my academic practice. Before coming to Oxford as a first-generation student, I was educated at state comprehensive schools in Barnsley and Rotherham, South Yorkshire. I regularly deliver academic taster sessions and talks for students from non-selective state schools and colleges.

Research

My research is situated at the critically under-studied intersection between the late Middle Ages and early modernity. My doctoral thesis offers a major re-evaluation of the early sixteenth century in France as an epoch of anthologies and conceptualises new frameworks for investigating how the art of anthologising works. This project matters because literary anthologies affect what, whom, and how we read, yet their roles and functions in French premodernity remain under-theorised. The corpus includes gardens and orchards of verse, anthologies of war, and single-author anthologies. Authors include more canonical ones such as George Chastelain, Jean Molinet, and Jean Lemaire de Belges, lesser-known poets like Guillaume Cretin, André De La Vigne, and Octovien de Saint-Gelais, as well as numerous minor or anonymous ‘others’.

Teaching

As Organising Tutor in French at St Peter’s, I teach the Prelims literature course and unseen translation. I teach a range of premodern options to second- and fourth-year undergraduates in tutorials and seminars, including Medieval French Literature (Paper VI) and Medieval Intersectional Identities (Paper XII).

In the Faculty of Medieval & Modern Languages, I lecture on ‘Key Concepts in Medieval French Literature’, and I teach language classes on Old and Middle French.

Publications

‘Denis Janot’s Chastelaine du Vergier: Ethics and the Spaces of Print Culture in the French Renaissance’, in La Chastelaine de Vergi: Encounters in Medieval Literary Space, ed. by Sophie Marnette and Helen J. Swift (Boydell & Brewer, 8 December 2026).

‘Les égarements du cœur et de l’esprit dans Le Vergier d’honneur. Repenser la cohérence anthologique au début du XVIe siècle’, co-authored with Lucien Dugaz, in Lyrique mise en récit: sur l’agencement de recueils au XVe et XVIe siècles, ed. by Ellen Delvallée and Pascale Mounier (Peter Lang, accepted for publication).

‘La Normandie rétro? La poésie tardomédiévale imprimée à Rouen de 1540 à 1600’, co-authored with Adrian Armstrong, in La Culture médiévale à la Renaissance, ed. by Adeline Desbois-Ientile, Nicolas Le Cadet, and Sandra Provini (Droz, accepted for publication).

‘Cretin imprimé. Le recueil des Traictez singuliers de Galliot Du Pré (1526)’, Cahiers de recherches médiévales et humanistes,  42.1 (2024), 243–64.

‘Bodies, Temporalities and Archives: Literary and Filmic Production after the 2010 Haitian Earthquake’ French Studies Bulletin, 44.166 (2023), 1–11. **Winner of the Society for French Studies R. Gapper Undergraduate Essay Prize 2021/22.