Presenters

Stine An

Stine An is a poet, literary translator, and performer based in New York City. Her poetry and translations have appeared in The Southern Review, World Literature Today, Chicago Review, Fence, Best American Experimental Writing 2018, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in Literary Arts from Brown University and a BA in Literature from Harvard College, and has received support through fellowships and grants from The Poetry Project, the American Literary Translators Association, Vermont Studio Center, Yaddo, and the PEN/Heim Translation Fund. Her interdisciplinary work explores diasporic poetics, experimental translation, and virtual performance. She is a member of the BIPOC Literary Translators Caucus.

Elsa Amanatidou

Elsa Amanatidou holds degrees from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, University of East Anglia and King’s College London, UK. Her research interests include testing and evaluation, assessment specifications development, the integration of literature and the arts in foreign language curricula, multiliteracies, critical literacies, inclusive and engaged pedagogies and technology assisted and mediated language learning.

Scott AnderBois

Scott AnderBois is Associate Professor of Linguistics at Brown University, and currently serves as Director of the Brown Program in Linguistics. His current research is focused on community-engaged language documentation, working in collaboration with speakers of A’ingae (an indigenous language isolate of Amazonian Ecuador) and other colleagues to create a diverse multimedia, multi-purpose collection of texts and use it to further community language goals and to answer scientific questions about the language’s grammar and use. This work is focused especially on issues in semantics/pragmatics, exploring ways in which languages do or do not vary in this domain.

Josh Babcock

Josh Babcock is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Brown University and Faculty Affiliate in the Programs in Linguistics and Science, Technology, and Society. His research focuses on colonial images and decolonial futures as they get made across media, sites, and scales. Josh’s primary research project focuses on language, race, and belonging in global Singapore. His work has appeared in American Anthropologist, the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Signs and Society, and the Journal of Southeast Asian Media Studies. Josh also publishes as a member of the editing and authorial collective, South/South Movement.

Susan Bernstein

Susan Bernstein received her PhD from Johns Hopkins University. She works in the fields of German, French, British and American literature and philosophy with a focus on the 18th and 19th centuries. She has written on Goethe, Nietzsche, Heine, Poe, and Baudelaire, and has published three books: Virtuosity of the Nineteenth Century – Performing Music and Language in Heine, Liszt and Baudelaire; Housing Problems – Literature and Architecture in Goethe, Walpole, Freud and Heidegger; and The Other Synaesthesia.

Marine Carpuat

Marine Carpuat is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of

Maryland, College Park. Her research aims to develop technology to help people communicate across language barriers. She is the recipient of an NSF CAREER award, research awards from Google and Amazon, best paper awards at EMNLP, *SEM and TALN, and an Outstanding Teaching Award. Marine also served as a Program Chair for NAACL 2022. Before joining the faculty at Maryland, she was a Research Scientist at the National Research Council Canada. She received a PhD in Computer Science and a MPhil in Electrical Engineering from the Hong Kong University of Science & Technology, and a Diplome d'Ingenieur from the French Grande Ecole Supelec.

Bruna Dantas Lobato

Bruna Dantas Lobato is a writer and translator. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Guernica, A Public Space, and The Common. Her translations include The Words That Remain by Stênio Gardel, winner of the 2023 National Book Award for Translated Literature. Dantas Lobato was born and raised in Natal, Brazil, and lives in St. Louis, Missouri. Her debut novel, Blue Light Hours, is forthcoming from Grove Atlantic in October 2024.

Joseph Dupris

Joseph Dupris is an enrolled member of the Klamath Tribes and an Advanced user of Klamath-Modoc language with ten years of experience in language and culture-based education in community and at the secondary, undergraduate, and graduate levels. Joseph received his Ph.D. in Anthropology and Linguistics from the University of Arizona in August 2020 and currently serves as a Visiting Assistant Professor in Native American and Indigenous Studies at Brown University, with affiliations in Linguistics and American Studies.

Ellen Elias-Bursac

Ellen Elias-Bursac translates fiction and non-fiction from the Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin and Serbian. In 2006 the novel Götz and Meyer by David Albahari in her translation from the Serbian was given the National Translation Award. She is a past president of the American Literary Translators Association.

Miled Faiza

Miled Faiza is a poet and translator. He is the author of Baqāya l-bayt allaḏī daḵalnāhu marratan wāḥida (2004) and Asabaʕ an-naḥḥāt (2019), and translator of Autumn (al-Kharif, 2017), as well as Winter (al-Shitā’, 2019) and Spring (ar-Rabiʕ, 2023), all by Ali Smith whose novel Autumn was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. He also translated Shukri Mabkhout’s The Italian (with Karen McNeil, 2021). He teaches Arabic at Brown University.

Paja Faudree

Paja Faudree is an award-winning scholar, translator, literary author, and activist. She currently chairs the Department of Anthropology at Brown University, where she is a professor of linguistic anthropology; she is also a founding member of the leadership team for Brown’s Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative. Much of her published scholarly research concerns how Indigenous people such as authors, songwriters, educators, linguists, and others are revitalizing and reclaiming their languages – work in which translation necessarily plays a critical role.

Dan Garrette

Dan is a Research Scientist at Google DeepMind in New York. His research focuses on Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning, with an emphasis on Multilinguality.

Kaiama L. Glover

Kaiama L. Glover is Professor of African American Studies and French at Yale University. She is the author of A Regarded Self: Caribbean Womanhood and the Ethics of Disorderly Being and of Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon, a prize-winning translator, and the co-host of the podcast WRITING HOME | American Voices from the Caribbean. She is currently writing and intellectual biography titled “Comrade Eros: René Depestre and the Poetics of a Radical Life.” Professor Glover has received awards from the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination, the New York Public Library Cullman Center, the PEN/Heim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Mellon Foundation.

Anton Hur

Anton Hur is a translator and author based in Seoul. Having been nominated for and losing numerous translation prizes, he is currently on the jury for the 2024 Dublin Literary Award. His debut novel in English, TOWARD ETERNITY will be published by HarperVia in July. His Korean nonfiction book on his life in translation, NO ONE TOLD ME NOT TO, was published by Across Books in Seoul last year.

Nikolas P. Kakkoufa

Nikolas P. Kakkoufa (PhD, King’s College London) is Lecturer in Modern Greek and Director of Undergraduate Studies for the Program in Hellenic Studies and the Department of Classics at Columbia University. He is an affiliated faculty member of the Institute for the Study of Gender and Sexuality and the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. He is also a Subject Matter Expert Consultant in the evaluation of the Oral Examination for Court Interpreters (Greek) for the New York State Unified Court System Office of Court Administration. He has held research fellowships at the University of Amsterdam and other institutions of learning. In 2021 he was awarded Columbia’s Provost Large-Scale Teaching & Learning Grant for the project Learning Greece from the Streets: An Urban E-Archaeology of the City.

Kevin McLaughlin

McLaughlin served as Dean of the Faculty from 2011-2022 at Brown University. He is currently the Director of the John Nicholas Brown Center for Advanced Study at Brown. McLaughlin became the Editor of Novel: A Forum for Fiction in 2023. He is the author of four scholarly books, the latest of which is The Philology of Life: Walter Benjamin's Critical Program (Fordham UP, 2023). McLaughlin is also the co-translator with Howard Eiland of Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project (Harvard UP, 1999).

Sawako Nakayasu

Sawako Nakayasu is an artist working with language, performance, and translation – separately and in various combinations. Her newest books include Pink Waves (Omnidawn, 2023), a finalist for the PEN/Voelcker award, Some Girls Walk Into The Country They Are From (Wave Books, 2020) and the pamphlet, Say Translation Is Art (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2020). Translations include The Collected Poems of Chika Sagawa (Modern Library, 2020), as well as Mouth: Eats Color – Sagawa Chika Translations, Anti-translations, & Originals (Rogue Factorial, 2011), a multilingual work of both original and translated poetry. Settle Her, which was written on the #1 bus line in Providence on Thanksgiving Day of 2017, on the occasion of her cutting ties with normative Thanksgiving celebrations, is forthcoming from Solid Objects.

JD Pluecker

JD Pluecker works with language, that is, a material thing, a thing of life and history. Their undisciplinary work inhabits the intersections of writing, history, translation, art, interpreting, bookmaking, queer/trans aesthetics, non-normative poetics, language justice, and cross-border cultural production. They have translated numerous books from the Spanish, including Gore Capitalism (Semiotext(e), 2018), Antígona González (Les Figues Press, 2016), Writing with Caca by Luis Felipe Fabre (Green Lantern Press, 2021), and Trash by Sylvia Aguilar Zéleny (Deep Vellum Press, 2023). More info at www.jdpluecker.com and www.antenaantena.org.

Michelle Quay

Michelle Quay is Lecturer of Persian at Brown University. Her research focuses on premodern Persian literature, particularly in the writings of Farid al-Din ‘Attar and other early Sufi mystics. She co-edited The Routledge Handbook of Persian Literary Translation (2022). Additionally, she recently won the inaugural Mo Habib Translation Prize in Persian Literature to translate Reza Ghassemi’s 1996 prize-winning novel, Woodwind Harmony in the Nighttime, forthcoming from Deep Vellum in 2025. Her short form literary translation work has appeared in such publications as Words Without Borders, Asymptote Journal, and World Literature Today.

Stéphanie Ravillon

Stéphanie Ravillon is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of French and Francophone Studies at Brown University. She graduated from the University of Burgundy, France, with a Ph.D. in Postcolonial Studies. Her current teaching and research interests include: contemporary French language, culture and society; second language acquisition; teaching with technology; teacher training; and translation. She has presented at conferences on translation and second language acquisition, on subtitling/dubbing and on community-based translation projects. She has also translated legal documents related to environmental and business law. She is currently working on a book project on translation pedagogy.

Matthew Reynolds

Matthew Reynolds is Professor of English and Comparative Criticism at Oxford University, where he chairs the Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation Research Centre (OCCT). Among his books are Prismatic Jane Eyre: Close-Reading a World Novel Across Languages (2023), Prismatic Translation (2019), Translation: A Very Short Introduction (2016), The Poetry of Translation: From Chaucer & Petrarch to Homer & Logue (2011), Likenesses (2013), The Realms of Verse: English Poetry in a Time of Nation-Building (2001), and the novels Designs for a Happy Home (2009) and The World Was All Before Them (2013).

Massimo Riva

Massimo Riva is the author of several books and a digital monograph (Shadow Plays. Virtual Realities in an Analog World, Stanford U. P. 2022, winner of a 2023 PROSE award from the Association of American Publishers). He is the editor of an anthology of contemporary Italian fiction and has translated works of fiction into Italian, including short stories by Robert Coover. His digital projects include the Decameron Web and the Virtual Humanities Lab, recipients of three major NEH grants, and the Garibaldi Panorama Archive, recipient of a Digital Innovation award from the American Council of Learned Societies.

Daisy Rockwell

Daisy Rockwell is an artist and Hindi-Urdu translator living in Vermont. She has translated numerous classic literary works from Hindi and Urdu into English, including Bhisham Sahni’s Tamas and Khadija Mastur’s The Women’s Courtyard. Her translation of Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand was the winner of the 2022 International Booker Prize and the 2022 Warwick Prize for Women in Translation. In 2020, she was the winner of MLA’s Aldo and Jeanne Scaglioni Prize for Translation of a Literary Work for Krishna Sobti’s A Gujarat Here, a Gujarat There. In 2023 she was awarded the Vani Foundation Distinguished Translator Award.

Julia Sanches

Julia Sanches translates literature from Spanish, Portuguese, and Catalan into English. Her translation of Boulder by Eva Baltasar was shortlisted for the 2023 International Booker Prize. Born in Brazil, she lives in Providence, Rhode Island.

Damion Searls

Damion Searls, Distinguished Writer in Residence, Wesleyan University, is a translator from German, Norwegian, French, and Dutch, and a writer in English. He has translated about sixty books, including ten by this year's Nobel Prize winner, Jon Fosse, and won numerous awards, including Guggenheim and Cullman Center fellowships and the major German-to-English translation prizes in America (for Uwe Johnson's ANNIVERSARIES) and England (twice, for books by Hans Keilson and Saša Stanišić). His own writing includes poetry, fiction, and two nonfiction books: THE INKBLOTS, a history of the Rorschach Test and biography of its creator, Hermann Rorschach, and THE PHILOSOPHY OF TRANSLATION, forthcoming in 2024.

Patricia Sobral

Patricia Sobral studied in Brazil and the United States and has lived between and among several cultures. She is the Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies at Brown University. Patricia Sobral integrates the performing, visual, digital, literary, and translation arts into her teaching to enhance language acquisition, deepen cultural awareness, and demonstrate how the arts can promote change in the individual and community.

Steven L. Thorne

Steven L. Thorne (Ph.D., UC Berkeley) is Professor of Second Language Acquisition in the Department of World Languages and Literatures at Portland State University (USA), with a secondary appointment in the Department of Applied Linguistics at the University of Groningen (The Netherlands). His research draws upon contextual traditions of language analysis and usage-based approaches to language development. Areas of interests include formative interventions in world languages education, communication across digital media and mobile technologies, and Indigenous language revitalization.

Jeremy Tiang

Jeremy Tiang has translated over thirty books from Chinese, including novels by Yan Ge, Yeng Pway Ngon, Lo Yi-Chin, and Zhang Yueran, and has been long- or shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, National Translation Award, PEN Translation Award, Cercador Prize, and Warwick Prize for Women in Translation. He also writes and translates plays, most recently Salesman之死, which had a sold-out run in NYC last year. His novel State of Emergency won the Singapore Literature Prize in 2018. He lives in Flushing, Queens. www.JeremyTiang.com

Kola Túbọ̀sún

Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún is a Nigerian writer and linguist, author of two collections of poetry, a dictionary of Yorùbá names, and publisher of OlongoAfrica.com. He's a Fulbright Scholar (2009), Chevening Fellow, British Library (2019), and the first African recipient of the Premio Ostana in Cuneo Italy (2016) for his work in indigenous language writings and advocacy. He is the Africa co-editor of the Best Literary Translations anthology forthcoming in April 2024 via Deep Vellum Books. He can be found at kolatubosun.com

Esther Whitfield

Esther Whitfield is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Hispanic Studies at Brown University. She is author of A New No-Man’s Land: Writing and Art at Guantánamo, Cuba, forthcoming in 2024; and Cuban Currency: The Dollar and ‘Special Period’ Fiction (2008). With Katerina Gonzalez Seligmann, she is translator of Cuban poet José Ramón Sánchez Leyva’s The Black Arrow (2023) and, with Jacqueline Loss, she is co-editor of the translated anthology New Short Fiction from Cuba (2007). In Brown’s Department of Comparative Literature, she teaches courses on translation to undergraduate and graduate students.