Capps Juliano

Thesis title: Cosmic Global Medieval Sound in Northumbrian Modernist Verse: 
Boethius, Dante, Chaucer, and Ferdowsi in Basil Bunting’s Briggflatts: an Autobiography

Supervisor: Marion Turner

Research Interests: Medieval and Modern Poetry, Sound Studies, Medieval and Late-Ancient Musical Cosmology, Apophatic Mysticism, Islamic and Christian Theology, Theories of Vernacular Poetics (English, Italian, and Persian), Global Medieval Poetics, Prosody, Epistemological Critique, Poetic Criticism, Intellectual History (on a diachronic scale), Medieval and Modern Fictionality, Modernist Medievalisms, and more.

Doctoral Research: My research examines the affordances of Basil Bunting’s investment in global medieval poetic forms to resound a personal, local, and modern experience in his magnum opus, Briggflatts: an Autobiography (1966). The primary questions this research explores are: How does the sonic medium of poetry condense complex theoretical paradigms across time, and to what extent does it do that differently in its aural and textual forms? How does engagement with medieval poetic sound in twentieth-century poetics transform its temporality? Does it collapse or dilate time? Does it clarify or obscure poetic meaning?

This research is generously funded by the Anne Hudson Scholarship.

Conferences:

‘The Afterlife of Chaucerian Accidie in Basil Bunting’s The Well of Lycopolis (1935): Apophatic, Sensuous, and Salvific’, the 24th Biennial Congress of the New Chaucer Society, University of Freiburg, July 2026.