Helena Rovira Cerda

Helena Rovira Cerda is an Assistant Professor in the Department of French, Romanesque, Italian and Arabic Philology at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Murcia. She earned her doctorate from the Universitat de Barcelona in 2014 with a thesis on El Valeri Màxim d'Antoni Canals estudi i edició (llibres I-V), supervised by Dr. Gemma Avenoza. Her academic profile shows a strong specialization in Romance philology, classical philology, and medieval literature with particular focus on Catalan literary traditions.

Her research interests span across several interconnected fields including textual transmission, classical reception in medieval literature, Catalan philology, and the study of exempla literature. She has published extensively on the Valerius Maximus tradition in Catalan literature, particularly focusing on Antoni Canals' translation and adaptation of this classical work. Her work often examines the transmission of classical motifs through medieval texts and their reception in Iberian contexts.

Her recent publications (2021-2025) demonstrate continued engagement with Catalan literary traditions, textual transmission, and the intersection of classical and medieval literature. Her work shows a consistent pattern of analyzing how classical stories and moral exempla were adapted and transformed in medieval Catalan literature, with particular attention to textual variants and cultural adaptations.

Rovira Cerda has also contributed significantly to the study of Catalan poetry, particularly from the medieval and early modern periods, with research on topics ranging from the Hero and Leander tradition to religious refrains in 16th-century Catalan poetry. Her scholarly approach combines philological precision with broader cultural analysis, examining how literary motifs travel across time and space.