Presenters
Qussay Al-Attabi
Qussay Al-Attabi is Assistant Professor of Arabic at Kenyon College and Visiting Scholar in Middle East Studies at Brown University. He is a scholar of modern Arabic literature whose research spans the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the Arab Middle East, focusing on the intersection of politics and literary and cultural production. Al-Attabi has translated three books into Arabic. His translation of George Yule’s Pragmatics (Oxford University Press) appeared in 2010, and his forthcoming co-translation of A Companion to Translation Studies (Multilingual Matters) is in press. Currently, he is translating into English a volume of colloquial Iraqi poetry.
Stine An
Stine Su Yon An is a Korean American poet, performer, and stand-up comedian based in Providence, Rhode Island. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in BAX 2018: Best American Experimental Writing, Electric Literature, Black Warrior Review, and the minnesota review, among other publications. Stine is an MFA candidate in Literary Arts at Brown University and a Vermont Studio Center Fellowship recipient. She holds a BA in Literature from Harvard College. Her interests include diasporic poetics, experimental translation, and counter-hegemonic presentations and performances of identity.
John Cayley
Cayley is the Chair of Literary Arts at Brown. He has practiced as a poet, translator, publisher, and bookdealer, and all these activities have been influenced by his training in Chinese language and culture. A number of Cayley's works of digital language art have addressed translation directly, not least translation itself (2004-) which was included last year in the exhibition ‘Babel: Adventures in Translation’ at the Bodleian Library, Oxford University. This exhibition was curated by Matthew Reynolds of the Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation research centre who also edited the just-published collection Prismatic Translation that includes Cayley's ‘[Mirroring] events at the sense horizon: translation over time’ as one of its chapters. Cayley has recently published a number of essays on the experimental translation of born-digital language art: ‘Beginning with “The Image” in How It Is when translating certain processes of digital language art’ and ‘The translation of process’ which was also collected in At Translation’s Edge. Details of Cayley's internationally recognized language art in networked and programmable media may be found on his personal website http://programmatology.shadoof.net.
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Sophie Collins
Sophie Collins grew up in Bergen, North Holland, and now lives in Glasgow. She is the author of the poetry collection Who Is Mary Sue? (Faber, 2018), winner of the Michael Murphy Memorial Poetry Prize and an Eric Gregory Award, and of small white monkeys (Book Works, 2017), a creative non-fiction text on self-expression, self-help and shame. She is editor of Currently & Emotion (Test Centre, 2016), an anthology of contemporary poetry translations; a sequel, Intimacy, is forthcoming in 2020. Her translation from the Dutch of Lieke Marsman, The Following Scan Will Last Five Minutes (Pavilion, 2019), was published earlier this year, when it was named a Poetry Book Society Choice. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a lecturer at the University of Glasgow.
Emily Drumsta
Emily Drumsta is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at Brown University. She specializes in modern Arabic and Francophone literatures, with particular focus on the Arabic novel, gender and the politics of meter in modernist Arabic poetry, and negotiations of language and identity in North African literature and culture. Her current book project, Ways of Seeking, offers a selective history of Arab detective fiction. She is also working on a PEN/Heim Award-winning volume of translations, "Revolt Against the Sun: The Selected Poetry of Nazik al-Malaika." She is a co-founder of Tahrir Documents, an online archive of newspapers, broadsides, pamphlets, and other ephemera collected in Cairo’s Tahrir Square during the 2011 Egyptian uprisings. Her translations have been published in McSweeney's, Asymptote, Jadaliyya, Circumference, and the Trinity Journal of Literary Translation.
Kate Goldman
Kate Goldman has worked as a freelance translator for academic institutions, NGOs and other clients for over 20 years. Over the past few years, she has volunteered with several organizations as a volunteer interpreter and translator. She works for the Dilley Pro Bono project as a legal assistant and interpreter both on the ground and remotely, preparing moms who are held in Dilley, Texas with their children for their credible fear interviews, usually in collaboration with an attorney. Here in Providence, Kate interprets for clients during psychological evaluations conducted through the Brown Human Rights Asylum Clinic. She also does written translations for organizations such as RAICES and the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project. Kate is the Center Manager for the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Brown University.
Katherine M. Hedeen
Katherine M. Hedeen is a translator of poetry, literary critic, and essayist. A specialist in Latin American poetry, her publications include book-length collections by Jorgenrique Adoum, Juan Bañuelos, Juan Calzadilla, Juan Gelman, Fayad Jamís, Hugo Mujica, José Emilio Pacheco, Víctor Rodríguez Núñez, and Ida Vitale, among many others. Her work has been a finalist for both the Best Translated Book Award and the National Translation Award. She is a recipient of two NEA Translation grants in the US and a PEN Translates award in the UK. She is a Professor of Spanish at Kenyon College and the Poetry in Translation Editor at the Kenyon Review and Associate Editor of Action Books.
Chloe Hill
Chloe Hill is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies at Brown University. Her research focuses on the role of the contemporary Brazilian novel in World Literature with a specific view to the kind of book that translates, or travels well, in the world. She holds a B.A. in Portuguese & Brazilian Studies and Comparative Literature from Smith College. Hill was the 2017 recipient of the Cliff Becker Prize for Poetry in Translation for her translation of Myriam Fraga's Purifications or the Sign of Retaliation (White Pine Press). In 2014, with the support of a Fulbright fellowship, she traveled to Brazil to work alongside Fraga, translating a selection of her poems. Hill's translations have also appeared in Metamorphoses: The Five-College Literary Translation Journal and Exchanges: The University of Iowa Literary Translation Journal.
Jen Hofer
Jen Hofer is a Los Angeles-based poet, translator, interpreter, teacher, knitter, book-maker, public letter-writer, urban cyclist, and co-founder of the language justice and language experimentation collaborative Antena Aire and the local language justice advocacy collective Antena Los Ángeles. Jen has received fellowships and awards from CantoMundo, the Academy of American Poets, the City of Los Angeles, the NEA, and PEN American Center. Jen publishes poems, translations, and visual-textual works with numerous small presses, including Action Books, Atelos, belladonna, Counterpath Press, Kenning Editions, Insert Press, Les Figues Press, Litmus Press, LRL Textile Editions, NewLights Press, Palm Press, Subpress, Ugly Duckling Presse, and in various DIY/DIT incarnations. Jen’s most recent books are translations by Mexican writers Dolores Dorantes, Myriam Moscona, and Rodrigo Flores Sánchez; translations of Uruguayan poet Virginia Lucas will be published in 2020 by Litmus Press. en el entre / in the between: Selected Writings from Antena Aire will be published in 2020 by The Operating System. Jen teaches writing and translation at Otis College of Art + Design and at Occidental College. Jen graduated from Brown University in 1994 with an independent concentration titled Writing Politics centered on poetry and political activism. She completed coursework in the English/Creative Writing Department, Comparative Literature, as well as in Modern Culture and Media and American Civilization.
Moira Inghilleri
Moira Inghilleri is the Director of Comparative Literature and of Translation And Interpreting Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her research interests include translation and migration, translation ethics, interpreting in war zones, the sociology of translation and interpreting, and the philosophy of language. She is the author of Translation and Migration (Routledge 2017) and Interpreting Justice: Ethics, Politics and Language (Routledge 2012). She guest-edited two special issues of The Translator: “Bourdieu and the Sociology of Translation and Interpreting” (2005) and “Translation and Violent Conflict” (2010). Her research has appeared in Translation Studies, The Translator, Target, Language and Communication, Linguistica Antverpiensia and numerous edited collections. In 2017 she was appointed to the Fulbright Specialist Roster for 2017-2020 in the field of translation and migration studies. She served as review editor for The Translator from 2006-2011 and co-editor from 2011-2014. She was the series co-editor for the Routledge book series, New Perspectives in Translation and Interpreting Studies from 2013-2018.
Nikolas Kakkoufa
Nikolas P. Kakkoufa is a Lecturer in Modern Greek in the Department of Classics, the Director of Undergraduate Studies for the Program in Hellenic Studies, and an Affiliate Faculty at the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Columbia University. He graduated from King’s College London, UK, with a Ph.D. in Modern Greek Studies. He teaches beginners to advanced classes in language and culture as well as seminars on literature and sexuality. His ongoing research projects focus on the examination of Modern Greek and English/American literature, on queer theory, on the image of the city in literature, and on the use of literature and translation pedagogy in second language acquisition. His research interests include language pedagogy and the work of among others Vitsenzo Kornaros, Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde, Kostis Palamas, and C. P. Cavafy. He has translated academic articles from English to Greek and legal documents related to family law. He is currently writing a book tentatively titled Word is the flesh’: the homosexual body in the work of Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde, and C. P. Cavafy.
Madhu Kaza
Born in Andhra Pradesh, India, Madhu H. Kaza is a writer, translator, artist and educator based in New York City. She is a translator of the feminist Telugu writers Volga and Vimala. Political Stories, her co-translation of a collection of Vimala's fiction was published in 2007 in India; other translations and original writing have appeared in Gulf Coast, Guernica, Waxwing, Chimurenga, The Encyclopedia Project, Two Lines and more. She recently edited Kitchen Table Translation, a volume that explores the connections between migration and translation and which features immigrant, diasporic and poc translators. She was the founding director of the Bard Microcollege at Brooklyn Public Library and currently serves as Faculty Advisor to the program. She also teaches in the MFA program at Columbia University.
John Keene
John Keene is the author of several books, including Annotations (1995); Seismosis (2006), a collaboration with artist Christopher Stackhouse; and Counternarratives (2015). Keene's other published work includes GRIND, a collaboration with photographer Nicholas Muellner; and the chapbook Playland. In 2018, he was awarded a five-year MacArthur Foundation Fellowship for his work "exploring the impact of historical narratives on contemporary lives and re-imagining the history of the Americas from the perspective of suppressed voices.” His translation from the Portuguese of Hilda Hilst's novel Letters from a Seducer was published in February 2014. He has translated poetry, fiction and essays from Portuguese, French and Spanish, and published these in literary periodicals as well as on his longstanding blog J's Theater. His essay "Translating Poetry, Translating Blackness" was featured on the Poetry Foundation's website in the spring of 2016 and has served as a galvanizing call for Black translators and translators of color, as well as those translating Black writers and writing, across the US and overseas. He chairs the Department of African American and African Studies and is Professor of English and African American Studies at Rutgers University-Newark where he also teaches in the MFA Creative Writing Program.
Zhuqing Li
Zhuqing Li, Visiting Associate Professor in Brown University’s Department of East Asian Studies and Faculty Curator at Brown’s Rockefeller Library, is a linguist focusing on the historical and social aspects of language. Her most recent research, published in the monograph Reinventing China (Bridge 21, 2016), focuses on a particular group of bilingual and bicultural elites, returnees to Chinese society from educational experiences in the West. Her earlier research on Chinese dialectology, with a particular emphasis on the languages of northern Fujian Province, resulted in a number of major publications, including two Chinese-English Dictionaries of Chinese dialects and a comprehensive study of Fuzhou dialect. At Brown, Li teaches courses on the history of the Chinese language, the linguistic principles of Chinese-English and English-Chinese translation, and the experience and role of returnees in China’s modernization process.
Kendall Morris
Kendall Morris is a first-year student in the Literary Arts MFA program at Brown University. She comes to Providence via California and Colorado. Her poetry has been published in the Chicago Review of Books’ magazine Arcturus, Chapman University’s interdisciplinary graduate journal Anastamos, and was recently chosen as a finalist for the Southhampton Review’s 2019 Short Short Fiction Contest. Her undergraduate thesis “Seeds of Things ” was directed by the poet Graham Foust, and received the University of Denver’s Mary Cass Award.
Ourida Mostefai
Ourida Mostefai holds a joint appointment in the Departments of Comparative Literature and French Studies at Brown University where she directs the French Center of Excellence.
Professor Mostefai received her M.A. and Ph.D. from New York University, and a Licence de Lettres from the Université de Paris III-Sorbonne Nouvelle. She was promoted to the rank of Officer in the Ordre des Palmes Académiques by the French National Ministry of Education in 2017. She is the author of two books on Rousseau: Le Citoyen de Genève et la République des Lettres (2003) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau écrivain polémique (2016) as well as numerous articles on the French Enlightenment. She is the co-editor of Rousseau and l’Infâme: Religion, Toleration, and Fanaticism in the Age of Enlightenment and Approaches to Teaching Rousseau’s “Confessions” and “Rêveries” and has edited Lectures de la Nouvelle Héloïse. She serves on the Editorial Boards of Eighteenth-Century Studies and of the Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies as well as on the Advisory Board of French Literature Series (FLS) and is the past President of the Rousseau Association. Professor Mostefai teaches a graduate level course on literary translation.
Rajiv Mohabir
Rajiv Mohabir received his PhD in English from the University of Hawai’i. He is currently Translations Editor at Waxwing Journal and teaches in the BFA/MFA program in the Writing, Literature, and Publishing department at Emerson College. Selected by Brenda Shaughnessy for the 2014 Intro Prize in Poetry by Four Way Books for his book entitled The Taxidermistʻs Cut (Spring 2016), Rajiv Mohabir's first collection is a finalist for the 2017 Lambda Literary Award in Gay Poetry. He received fellowships from Voices of Our Nationʻs Artist foundation, Kundiman, The Home School (where he was the Kundiman Fellow), and the American Institute of Indian Studies language program. His second manuscript The Cowherd’s Son won the 2015 Kundiman Prize (Tupelo Press in May 2017). He was also awarded a 2015 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant for his translation of Lalbihari Sharma’s Holi Songs of Demerara (Kaya Press, 2019), published originally in 1916. His memoir, Antiman, winner of the 2019 New Immigrant Writing Award from Restless Books is forthcoming in 2021.
Sawako Nakayasu
Sawako Nakayasu is an artist working with language, performance, and translation – separately and in various combinations. She has lived mostly in the US and Japan, briefly in France and China, and translates from Japanese. Her books include Pink Waves (forthcoming, Omnidawn), Some Girls Walk Into The Country They Are From (forthcoming, Wave Books), The Ants (Les Figues Press), Texture Notes (Letter Machine Editions), and the translation of The Collected Poems of Chika Sagawa (Canarium Books), as well as Mouth: Eats Color – Sagawa Chika Translations, Anti-translations, & Originals (reprint forthcoming, Wave Books), a multilingual work of both original and translated poetry. She is co-editor, with Eric Selland, of an anthology of 20th Century Japanese Poetry (forthcoming, New Directions). She teaches at Brown University. http://www.sawakonakayasu.net/
Giulia Pellizzato
Giulia Pellizzato is Postdoctoral Fellow at the Italian Studies Department of Brown University. Her research focuses on transnational literary networks, women in publishing, and how translation modifies literary works, from their text to their material appearance. She presented her work in the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Italy, and the United States. Pellizzato was the 2018 recipient of an Early Postdoc.Mobility Grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation. Her forthcoming monograph on the correspondence between Goffredo Parise and Giuseppe Prezzolini is in press for Leo S. Olschki. Her interests include printing culture, archives of the XIX and XX century, relationships between literature and science, and science communication.
Sam Perry
Sam has spent many years in Japan and South Korea doing research, most recently in Tokyo, where he surveyed various archives for his next monograph "From Across the Genkai Sea: Japanese Culture and the Korean War." He has been involved in two translation projects: Five Faces of Japanese Feminism: Crimson and Other Works (Univ. Hawaii Press, 2016), a collection of translated stories by Sata Ineko, funded with a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and "A Century of Queer Korean Fiction", the first anthology of homoerotic writings from Korea to be published in English. His teaching at Brown focuses broadly on Japanese and Korean culture, the historical relationship between Japan and Korea, as well as the translation of minority literary culture in both Japan and Korea. Perry is an Associate Professor of East Asian Studies and Comparative Literature at Brown University.
Stéphanie Ravillon
Stéphanie Ravillon is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of French Studies at Brown University. She graduated from the University of Burgundy, France, with a Ph.D in Postcolonial Studies. She has been engaged in research that examines questions of identity and self in the post-colonial world. Her current interests include: contemporary French language, culture and society; second language acquisition; teaching with technology; and translation. She has presented at conferences on translation and second language acquisition, on subtitling and on community-based translation projects. She has also translated legal documents related to environmental and business law. She is the 2014 recipient of the Harriet W. Sheridan Award for Distinguished Contribution to Teaching and Learning. She was elected for a three-year term (starting January 7, 2019) for a seat in the MLA Delegate Assembly (specifically, a professional-issues seat in the category “Language Programs”).
Nidia Schuhmacher
Nidia Schuhmacher is Senior Lecturer in Hispanic Studies at Brown University. Her work has involved mentoring and training teachers, designing curricula, and developing course materials, as well as undertaking projects in translation, interpretation, and editorial work. Her areas of interest include language pedagogy, the use of technology in language instruction, second language acquisition, the teaching of writing and culture and translation. In recent years, she has developed a special interest in the intersection of the arts and performance with language learning. She has sponsored Group Independent Study Projects in Medical Spanish and is currently the Faculty Adviser for the student-directed Medical Spanish curriculum in the Brown Alpert Medical School. Schuhmacher designed and teaches the Introduction to Professional Translation and Interpretation course. She received the John Rowe Workman Award for Excellence in Teaching in the Humanities in 2015.
Sophie Seita
Sophie Seita is an assistant professor at Boston University specialising in poetry, performance, and practice-based research. Before coming to BU, she held a post-doctoral research fellowship at Queens’ College, Cambridge, and visiting fellowships at Columbia, NYU, Yale, and Princeton. Seita describes her work in the following way: “My text- and research-based practice spans performance, lecture-performance, poetry, video, translation, and multi-media and queer-feminist collaborations. I explore how text and the act of reading can be visualised and translated into movement and other media and materials, via costume, choreography, sound, projection, interaction with sculptural objects, and installation.” Seita's most recent publication Provisional Avant-Gardes: Little Magazine Communities from Dada to Digital was published by Stanford University Press in 2019. The New York Times considers her facsimile edition of the New York Dada magazine The Blind Man (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2017) one of the Best Art Books of 2017. She has translated Uljana Wolf’s i mean i dislike that fate that i was made to where and Subsisters: Selected Poems, for which she received a PEN/Heim grant. Most recently in November 2019, she presented her performance Emilia Galotti’s Colouring Book of Feelings as part of the Bauhaus centenary exhibition at Kunsthalle Darmstadt, Germany.
Zachary Sng
Zachary Sng is Associate Professor of German Studies and Comparative Literature and Chair of German Studies at Brown University. He received his PhD in Comparative Literature with a focus in German from Johns Hopkins University. He works on the literature and philosophy of Britain and Germany around the 18th century, covering the intellectual and literary movements of the Enlightenment and Romanticism. The Rhetoric of Error from Locke to Kleist (Stanford University Press, 2010) explores the relationship between language and understanding through the figure of error, and examines how writers claim to generate knowledge out of and about error in the period between the Enlightenment and Romanticism. Middling Romanticism (forthcoming, Fordham University Press) is a study of moderation, mediation, and other figurations of the "middle" in the 18th century and in contemporary theoretical discussions. Sng's other research interests include rhetoric, literary theory, and the history of aesthetics.
Cole Swensen
Cole Swensen has published 17 volumes of poetry, most recently On Walking On (Nightboat Books, 2017). Art in Time, a collection of hybrid lyric writings on visual art, is coming out from Nightboat Books in 2021. The author of a collection of critical essays, Noise That Stays Noise (U. Michigan 2011) and the co-editor of the Norton anthology American Hybrid, she has been a finalist twice for the LA Times Book Award and once for the National Book Award and has been awarded the Iowa Poetry Prize, the SF State Poetry Center Book Award, and the National Poetry Series. She translates poetry, prose, and art criticism from French and won the 2004 PEN USA Award in Literary Translation. She divides her time between Paris and Providence RI, where she teaches at Brown University.
Stephanie van Reigersberg
Van Reigersberg is a diplomatic interpreter. She worked for the US State Department and the White House where she was head of the Interpreting Service for 18 years. She was a diplomatic interpreter during the Panama Canal negotiations, the 444-day effort to free hostages from Iran, and for many meetings with Fidel Castro and other members of the Cuban Government. She currently is a conference interpreter (simultaneous and consecutive) for a wide range of international organizations and private businesses,working for organizations such as the International Monetary Fund, the Organization of American States and the Pan American Health Organization.
Esther Whitfield
Esther Whitfield is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Hispanic Studies at Brown University. She received a B.A. in Modern Languages from Oxford University and a Ph. D. in Romance Languages & Literatures from Harvard University. She teaches courses on Latin American, Caribbean and European literature. Her current work analyzes uses of war in Latin American political speech, literature and the arts since the mid-twentieth century, with specific reference to Guantánamo, the "War on Terror" and Cuba's wars on imperialism. Whitfield is also co-editor, with Anke Birkenmaier, of Havana Beyond the Ruins (Duke University Press, 2011), a collection of essays on post-1989 Havana; and, with Jacqueline Loss, of an anthology of Cuban short fiction in translation, New Short Fiction from Cuba (Northwestern University Press, 2007). She wrote a critical introduction to Antonio José Ponte's Un arte de hacer ruinas (Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2005) and has published a number of journal articles and book chapters on contemporary Latin American fiction and Welsh diasporic literature.
Baoli Yang
Baoli is a graduate student in Comparative Literature at Brown University. She is working on her dissertation exploring how literary texts perceive and portray borders, frontiers, and migration routes in medieval Eurasia, especially in Tang era China and its neighboring states. Her research also discusses the repercussions of the medieval consciousness of sovereignty and territory in modern times. Her interest in translation studies lies in the gain and loss of Chinese poetry from being translated into other languages.