Fabienne Michelet Pickavé

Fabienne Michelet is Assistant Professor of medieval literature in the Department of English at the University of Toronto. Her teaching and research focus on medieval English literature, especially Old English poetry; cultural geography and questions of space and place; discourses of heroism and heroic agency. Her first book, Creation, Migration and Conquest: Imaginary Geography and Sense of Space in Old English Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), explores spatial representations found both in historical documents and in verse; it examines how the Anglo-Saxons’ spatial imaginaire shapes perceptions and representations of geographical space. Her new project, Questions of Heroism/Heroism in Question in Old English Literature, analyses how the heroic figure is constructed in language, with a particular focus on the thematic and stylistic conventions that are used to ‘heroify’ a protagonist. Much of her recent work has focused on the links between place, identity, and collective memory, on the intersections of fictional and economic discourses, on mediality, and on food and body practices.