The following are excerpts from a series of conversations between Professor Galvez and Ananya Akkaraju, a senior at Dublin High School who is interested in pursuing women’s and gender studies. Ananya engaged Professor Galvez in numerous topics including humanities research at Stanford and her own scholarly interests in the intersection between medieval poetry and gender studies. 

These interviews were conducted from September to October 2025 by Ananya. This collaboration was designed as an effort to have a capacious discussion about research and increased involvement in the humanities for a rising generation of interested students, especially in this era of AI. Professor Galvez spoke on the relation of medieval studies and the Global South, the subject of her forthcoming book, Before the Global South: Unthinking Medieval Poetry (University of Chicago Press), as well as how troubadour poetry can give a fresh lens on contemporary gender politics.

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Interview 1: Conversations on the Humanities in the Global South

Ananya Akkaraju: You were talking about making your work more flexible and really trying to incorporate your background into what you're learning when you pursue the humanities. That really resonated with me. 

Thank you for that wonderful response. I wanted to move on to the next question, which is: “What are your thoughts on the Europeanization of ideas that are outside the Western core, especially ideas that are very central to the culture of the Global South?” 

Professor Galvez: I think the first thing that students should know is: what are those ideas that became Europeanized? What were they before they were Europeanized? It's so hard sometimes to access them. Sometimes, these ideas might not be written down. Maybe they're invisible. Maybe they're in an archive—in Brazil, for example—that burnt down. There is the effort to not only access these ideas but other forms of knowledge that became colonized or Europeanized. How do we access them if they're from someone else’s point of view—if we're in our own culture where we don't have a direct dialogue with the ideas? 

But we can try, right?  So, provisional attempts to get at Native American thinking about crystals—something I've been working on these past years—there are numerous ways to go about this. We think of crystals in a certain way—even all throughout Western tradition—as simply just a gemstone. But maybe in Native American cultures, it was something that was part of a ritual system, part of a belief system, a completely different way of thinking about an earth stone. 

Then the question arises: how do you access that other meaning? Well, maybe you have to depend on people who are doing anthropological studies and are in dialogue with those people, those indigenous cultures, and see how they use those materials. And so, the more that you make a conversation between something that's not westernized and our own ideas—ideas of how we came to understand things like crystals as an object of study, as a gemstone, as a material that's used for our iPhones now—the more we can understand deeply what that relationship is, especially when it’s a productive relationship like this one. 

And when we think of Europeanization, what does that mean? Why is it that there has been this idea that Europe is the dominant mode of thinking? How did that come to be? There's a whole history about that. And so, for example, students should be invested in understanding why English became so dominant as a language—though this wasn’t always the case. How is it that things aren’t as they've always been? That's why history comes about, that's why looking at different texts and being able to place yourself in that person's other position or voice is so important. And even though you're different, still have the understanding that your attempt in trying to understand is what’s most important. Think to yourself, I'm going to try to attempt to speak another language, because I can get closer to another identity and way of being.

The key is really trying to think about how one accesses forms of knowledge. It can be an object or whatever you may be interested in. Understand its history before it was Europeanized, and understand why it was Europeanized, and why there was a colonization. Why did it have to be viewed in a certain way? How did that trajectory happen? The most important thing about education is to always wonder, and have that belief that things did not always have to be that way. It’s not there just because it is, or because it happened by chance. There are different ways that those things came to be. That inquisitiveness is what truly makes us human, and when you stop questioning that, then you might as well just be a robot and have everyone tell you what to do.

Interview 2: Conversations on Culture and Medievalism

AA: Welcome back Professor! Today we’ll be talking about the impact of culture on medievalism. My first question for you is, “How has the culture of the Middle Ages influenced troubadour lyric, and do you have any thoughts or ideas on how perhaps gender norms during the Middle Ages might have influenced lyric as well?”

MG: Right. Usually when you think about this kind of troubadour love lyric, you think about this lady on a pedestal and these men who are singing about wanting to have this lady. But it was actually a song about the men themselves; it was more like: “I want this, but look how great I am for singing this song.” It was a kind of self-affirmation, and we see this in pop love songs too. It's always kind of a “passive-aggressive play,” as my students would say. 

In regards to the gender norms—one of the other things that's important to know is that once you start studying this medieval lyric, there were—even though predominantly the majority of songs were in the male kind of voice—songs in which women could be singing. They were the trobairitz, women troubadours, who sang their own versions of love songs. And the language they used was very contractual legal language. It was much more dialogic; you would often see them saying, “I thought we had a deal. I know we had a contract! How come you're not living up to your side of the contract?” And they demand a response. I think it was one of these very important moments in the history of lyric, in which we see female voices very much responding to male voices. The fact that these female lyrics were compiled in the songbooks next to male lyrics is truly amazing. They weren't given a separate category. They were right up there with the male lyrics. We don't have that many of them, but still, that's pretty remarkable. If you look at the troubadour lyric, it really is about the status of negotiation. It's about being able to talk to someone who has more power over you ostensibly.

Imagine you're in a feudal society. You have a lord, and you have a vassal, and the vassal is thinking: “I'm always going to be lower than you, but how do I maintain my dignity?” That kind of relationship was transferred over to love language; almost like, “I love you, but are you going to be a good lover to me?” 

When I introduce students to this kind of medieval love poetry, there’s the phrase, "the status of negotiation," because it's not about simple flattery or obedience. It's about arguing, using language, to explain why you have worth, using the conventions that they use in these kinds of rhetorical things about the language of love. That's what the troubadours are known for. They invented a certain way of talking about love that was embodied in words and music together, and that was their big invention. 

So, that's the kind of historical context that's important to think about when reading and listening to this lyric. In the Middle Ages, you had a feudal society, and you had a religious kind of lyric that was lyric towards God, but then you had the troubadour language, and it was kind of melding all those influences together.

When William IX, the first troubadour, appeared on the scene, it was like this culture and way of artfully singing was fully born. It was truly sophisticated poetry—competitive. Intense. And it was very short lived, as well: in about 150 years nearly gone. The context of the feudal society of Occitania is really important, obviously, but the fact that they invented this love language makes you pause—what was their need? I think they found this language as a way to channel political power and peer negotiation but it was perhaps also about gender—the service dynamics, what one owes to each other, between male and a female. Before troubadour poetry, you didn't have this kind of intense love lyric dedicated to an ideal, inaccessible love, unrequited love. You had poetry about war, a king, and God. But suddenly there was this unattainable woman, a noble ideal, and a song about erotic, yet unconsummated love, a song about desire. That became the focus of a certain way of talking about love. 

This is how I think medieval context illuminates why this love language was so powerful for this aristocratic society. And aristocratic means that they knew the conventions. You were initiated into a way of being. They knew the rules of the game, just like any kind of traditional, communal, pre-modern love poetry. When you think about your own experience, maybe with Indian music, you have to know certain conventions, right? Certain ways, rules, contexts—it might be repetitive, but that's part of it. It's not about originality, it's about what you do with all those things.

Interview 4: Conversations on Being a Medievalist

In this excerpt, Professor Galvez and Ananya Akkaraju discuss outliers that Professor Galvez has encountered in her work. The first outlier she discusses (not included in this excerpt) is the first troubadour, William IX. The other outliers (discussed below) are the trobairitz, or female troubadours.

MG: And the other outliers, I would say, is just because we only have so few of them, are the female troubadours, the “trobairitz.” It’s so important that we know about them, though, because within the pre-modern Western world, we know of Sappho from ancient Greece, and then we also know of late medieval and Renaissance female poets and writers such as Christine de Pizan and Louise Labé. But between them, there's hardly anything. You just do not have any female voices. You have people singing about ladies, you have important historical women—Eleanor of Aquitaine, or Elizabeth I, Queen Elizabeth—but we don't actually have women poetesses. The trobairitz, the few of them we see, not only are female troubadours in their own right, but they create their own voice that's in dialogue with the troubadours in the male voice. So I think that they are an outlier, but a very important one for understanding that there were female troubadours out there, women voices, and that they could construct their own voices in a particular way about legal contracts and a kind of love as a dialogue rather than a monologue.

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AA: So, would you say, when you talk about love as dialogue versus a monologue, do you think you have noticed any other differences between troubadour lyric and trobairitz lyric? They both talk about love, but do you see any differences in the way they talk about it? I know you talked about how they use contractual language, but is there any other major difference you've noticed?

MG: Yes, so they use that legalistic language, but they are sometimes very directly sensual, and might say something like, “Oh, we had this night together, where are you? Are you going to be coming back? Our love is continual, and I'm waiting for you to come back.” Whereas the troubadour says, “Oh, the girl, she’s gone now. I’m so sad that she left me. Why doesn’t she see how true my love is? Anyway I don’t want any women anymore.” The trobairitz would say, “Okay, so we had something, so where are you? That was a great time, and it's not over, right?”

For example, take the Countess of Dia, the Comtessa de Dia, the Lady of Dia—she has this great song where she sets the terms of how she should be valued: by her beauty, rank, and mind, and even more than her mind, her true heart. She plays them at their own game. She's saying, “You can't just name the categories that you rank me—I also have a say in this. What things about me do you rank?” So just those kinds of poetry are very responsive, very dialogic, but also very sensual. It’s not just, “Oh, lady, I can't have you, so let me just talk about how I can't have you.” The ladies are saying, “It was really great that we were together, I want to be with you again. How can we make this work?”

AA: Definitely. And then, have you noticed any variations within trobairitz? For example, maybe some trobairitz are talking about this, but then some are talking about another topic? Have you noticed any variation in that sense? Within the same group of individuals?

MG: Yes, the dialogue poetry, these tensos—where there's actually a dialogue between the troubadour and the trobairitz—are really interesting, because they'll take a topic, such as how do you love best? What is a good lover? And the men will say, “Well, the man should always be subservient to the lady, and do what she says if he's a good lover.” And then the lady says, “Well, I don't know, maybe they should be equal. We should call each other friends—so that we're on par.” And then the man’s saying, “No, in a proper relationship, the man is always subordinate to the lady, that's the proper way to be.” 

It's the debates we have today. The man should always hold the door for the lady, and some women say, “No, I don't want to be treated like that,” but some ladies think, “No, I actually like that, I like that courtesy.” 

Or, another question: should we split the bill? Some ladies say, “Yes, that's equality,” and then some men say, “No, no, if you're a proper gentleman, you always pay.” And then I have girlfriends who say, “No, no, you never look at the bill, ever. No.”

So these kinds of gender politics, power politics, were already in these tensos, where they were asking “what is a proper way of loving? If you really love someone, should you always do what they say, or should you also be clear about what you get in return?”

AA: Wow, that is so interesting. I think it's amazing how there's this gender politics going on with the trobairitz and the troubadours, and then you see the same type of thing still happening today. I think that's definitely interesting—especially how you were talking about the debate, or the dialogue that was going on between the two, or how women felt that they should be equal or on the same level. I think that yes, there's definitely divisions within women themselves, where some people like that courtesy, whereas you mentioned some people want to be on the same level—so I think that's very interesting in that sense, and I think it's definitely carried over into what we see today.

MG: Yes, what's important to remember is that these songs played out this idea that it wasn't a married relationship, but that it was always about an inaccessible and adulterous love affair, both in this kind of fictional world of poetry. But what they're really playing out are just kind of the politics between two people that are played out in language: what do you owe to each other when you say you love each other, and what does that mean? What does that entail? Does it entail the idea of service? Is it saying, “I willfully submit to you, what are you going to do for me”? And how do we make sure that is true, what you say is authentic and true, through poetry? That's what they were playing out through language: the ethical and moral obligation to another person, in other words, what you do for that beloved and what you should do for that same person, are these things in conflict? Do you say what you mean and do, or will do?

This was in the vernacular rather than the official written language in religious and legal texts. You have to imagine, in this world, there was feudal language, contracts in Latin. There were church doctrines, that was in Latin. You heard in it in church, and then these aristocrats made their own little world in poetry, in which they had all their personal politics and things they were interested in—things about desire, about the relations between people, about negotiation of status. And that's what this love language was there for.

AA: Wow, yes, definitely. I wish there were a way that more people could know about this. I think this is some really interesting information. I definitely wish more students my age could know about it, because I think it's really interesting to think about how politics were then, and then how they are now, and that difference—but then also things that might have continued. Thank you for your response to that question.