Dr Andrea M.L. Williams

D Phil (Oxford), BA Hons (Adelaide)
Lecturer
Director of European Studies Program
Associate Director of the Centre for Medieval Studies
Room 754, A18

+61 2 9351 2575

Andrea Williams took her Honours Degree in French at Adelaide University, with a thesis on the novels of Michel Tournier. She then obtained a Commonwealth Scholarship for Oxford University, where she became a Medievalist, completing her D Phil on the French Grail Romances in 1994. In 2001 she published a book entitled The Adventures of the Holy Grail: a study of La Queste del Saint Graal. Present research projects include a study of the Grail Romance Perlesvaus, an iconographic and textual analysis of representations of the Grail in Medieval France, and a study of the Tristan legend in 20th-century French culture.
In 1992 she was appointed to a Lectureship at Exeter University, where she remained until her move to Sydney in 2005.

• Medieval French literature, especially Arthurian Romance
• Medieval Art, especially iconography
• Medieval themes in modern French culture.

• Imagining the Grail: Text and Image in the French Grail Romances (book-length project)
• A study of the Perlesvaus
• A comparative analysis of Bédier’s Tristan and the Cocteau/Delannoy film “L’Eternel Retour”

Books

• The Adventures of the Holy Grail: a study of “La Queste del Saint Graal”, Oxford, Peter Lang, 2001 (206 pp.). ISBN: 3 906766 84 5

Book Chapters

• "Dreams and Visions in the Perlesvaus", in B.Wheeler (ed.): Arthurian Studies in Honour of P.J.C.Field, Cambridge, D.S. Brewer 2004 (pp. 73-80) ISBN: 01261-9814
• "VI Perceval and the Grail: The Continations, Robert de Boron, Perlesvaus", in Glyn Burgess & Karen Pratt (ed.), The Arthur of the French: the Arthurian Legend in Medieval French and Occitan Literature, Cardiff, Wales, University of Wales Press, 2006 (215-273), ISBN: 13-978-0-7083-1964-2
• "VII Lancelot with and without the Grail: Lancelot do Lac and the Vulgate Cycle (chapter editor Elspeth Kennedy)", in Glyn Burgess & Karen Pratt (ed.), The Arthur of the French: the Arthurian Legend in Medieval French and Occitan Literature, Cardiff, Wales, University of Wales Press, 2006 (274-324), ISBN: 13-978-0-7083-1964-2

Articles

• "Perspectives on the Grail: Subjectivity of Experience in La Queste del Saint Graal", in Reading Medieval Studies XXVI pp.141-153. ISBN: 0 7049 12147 ISSN: 0950 3129

Teaching

• Medieval French literature, especially Arthurian Romance
• Medieval Art, especially iconography
• Medieval themes in modern French culture
• Michel Tournier

• Organization: British Arthurian Conference, Exeter, September 1997
  Sydney Arthurian Colloquium, Sydney, July 2007
• Recent papers given:
  International Arthurian Congress, University of Wales, Bangor, July 2002
  International Congress on the Arts and Humanities, University of Hawaii, January 2003
  International Medieval Congress, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo USA, May 2003
  International Medieval Congress, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo USA, May 2004
  International Arthurian Congress, University of Utrecht, Netherlands, July 2005

• Co-founder of University of Exeter University Centre for Medieval Studies
• Treasurer (1999-2004) of the British Branch of the International Arthurian Society
• Member of the following additional societies:
  International Courtly Literature Society; Anglo-Norman Text Society; University of Sydney Centre for Medieval Studies