Carmela V. Franklin

On Leave Academic Year 2022-2023

Research Interests: Medieval Latin literature, Transmission of texts and manuscript studies, Greek and Latin hagiography, Study of the Bible in the early Middle Ages, Early medieval Rome. Bede

Carmela Vircillo Franklin received her B.A. and Ph.D. in Classics (Medieval Latin) from Harvard University. She joined the Columbia faculty in 1993.  From July 1, 2005 until September 2010, she served as the 20th Director of the American Academy in Rome. 

Her research focuses on medieval Latin texts and their manuscripts, and much of it is conducted in Europe’s great manuscript repositories, especially the Vatican Library and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.  Among her recent publications are The Latin Dossier of Anastasius the Persian: Hagiographic Translations and Transformations (2004), which follows an interdisciplinary approach to early medieval culture, transcending traditional linguistic and geographical boundaries; and Material Restoration: An 11th Century Fragment from Echternach in a 19th Century Parisian Codex (2009), a study in “material philology.”

She is now engaged in a book project provisionally entitled “The Liber pontificalis of Pandulphus Romanus: From Schismatic Document to Renaissance Exemplar,” centered on the redaction of the papal chronicle created during the schism of 1130.