Benjamín José Franzani García, PhD

 A lawyer with a degree in Legal Sciences from the University of Los Andes, I practiced law at the university's Legal Clinic between 2011 and 2019. In 2019, I obtained my master's degree in literature from the University of Chile, with a thesis on medieval Spanish epic poetry that was published by Tirant lo Blanch.

To continue my studies, I pursued a double doctorate in Medieval Civilization and Literature at the Universities of Poitiers (France) and Lausanne (Switzerland), obtaining a doctorate from both universities in 2025. Back in Chile, I joined the faculty of the Institute of Literature at the University of Los Andes as a professor of medieval literature.

My main interest is focused on chansons de geste, medieval French epic poetry, and in particular the cycle of Guillaume d'Orange. I focus on the relationships that chansons de geste allow us to establish between literary fiction and historical imaginaries, studying the contexts of production and reception that allow us to identify the horizons of expectation that frame the text. In this type of analysis, I privilege the contributions of studies on orality and emotions, in line with the “emotional communities” proposed by Barbara Roesenwein. I am also interested in other literary productions in the langues d'oil and d'oc, such as the Arthurian romances and the troubadour songbooks.

I have been a professor in both the Law School and the Humanities School at the University of the Andes. In the former, I taught “Research Seminar I” and was in charge of students doing internships at the Legal Clinic. In the Faculty of Humanities, I taught an elective seminar on literature, focusing on medieval epic poetry. Since 2026, with my permanent appointment to the Literature faculty, I have been teaching a monographic course on Dante and a course on Medieval Universal Literature, as well as a research seminar, all for undergraduate students. At the postgraduate level, I will be teaching an elective course on the Middle Ages.