Translation Symposium

Sadia Abbas

Associate Professor of Postcolonial Studies at Rutgers University-Newark

Sadia Abbas is associate professor of postcolonial studies at Rutgers University-Newark. She is the author of At Freedom’s Limit: Islam and the Postcolonial Predicament, winner of the MLA first book award, and the novel The Empty Room, shortlisted for the DSC prize for South Asian Literature, which tells the story of a woman painter in 70s Pakistan, and co-editor (with Jan Howard of the RISD museum) of Shahzia Sikander: Extraordinary Realities, a volume on Shahzia Sikander’s art. She has written numerous essays on subjects including Jesuit poetics and Catholic martyrdom in Early Modern English poetry, neoliberalism and the Greek debt crisis, Pakistani art, the uses of Reformation in contemporary Muslim thought, and Jewish converts to Islam and treatments of subjectivity in contemporary theorizations of Muslim female agency. She has also written essays and opinion pieces for Dawn and Daily Times (the Pakistani dailies), Naya Daur, OpenDemocracy, CommonDreams and TANK magazine. She is currently completing, Space in Another Time: An Essay on Ruins, Monuments and the Management of Modern Life about the connected afterlives of ruins and monuments in India, Greece and the Americas and their role in the production and control of racial, religious and ethnic identities. She is co-founder and co-editor of Ideas and Futures, a multi-media, interdisciplinary e-journal of culture and politics and Executive Director of Ideas and Futures: A Collaborative for Just and Vibrant Societies.

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Karen Emmerich

Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University

Karen Emmerich is a translator of modern Greek poetry and prose, and Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University, where she also directs the Program in Translation and Intercultural Translation. She is the author of Literary Translation and the Making of Originals (2017), as well as of many volumes of Greek literature in translation.

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Ignacio Infante

Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Spanish, and Associate Director of the Center for the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis

Ignacio Infanteis Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Spanish, and Associate Director of the Center for the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis. He is the author of After Translation: The Transfer and Circulation of Modern Poetics across the Atlantic (Fordham University Press, 2013). His research in the fields of comparative literature, translation studies, modern and avant-garde poetics, and Hispanic studies has been published in numerous edited volumes and scholarly journals, such as Variaciones Borges, Revista Hispánica Moderna, Modern Philology, Comparative Literature, The Comparatist, Translation Review, and Modernism/modernity,among others. A literary translator, he has translated the work of US poet John Ashbery, A Wave / Una Ola (Lumen/Penguin Random House, 2003); the British novelist Will Self, How the Dead Live / Cómo viven los muertos (Random House Mondadori, 2003); and, more recently, co-translated with Michael Leong Sky-Quake: Tremor of Heaven by Chilean avant-garde poet Vicente Huidobro (co-im-press, 2020).

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Ignacio Sánchez Prado

Professor in Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis

Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado is Jarvis Thurston and Mona van Duyn Professor in Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis. His research focuses on Mexican cultural institutions with a focus on literature, cinema and gastronomy. He is the author of seven books including Strategic Occidentalism. On Mexican Fiction, the Neoliberal Book Market and the Question of World Literature and Screening Neoliberalism. Transforming Mexican Cinema 1988-2012. The most recent of his fifteen edited collections is Mexican Literature as World Literature. His public writing has appeared in The Washington Post, Los Angeles Review of Books, Words Without Borders and other publications. He serves as editor of two book series: Latin American Cinema at SUNY Press and Critical Mexican Studies at Vanderbilt University Press. He served as the Kluge Chair for the Cultures of the South at the Library of Congress in the summer of 2021.

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Haun Saussy

University Professor, East Asian Languages & Civilizations and Committee on Social Thought at University of Chicago

Haun Saussy is University Professor at the University of Chicago, teaching in the department of East Asian Languages & Civilizations as well as in the Committee on Social Thought. His work attempts to bring the lessons of classical and modern rhetoric to bear on several periods, languages, disciplines and cultures. Among his books are The Problem of a Chinese Aesthetic (1994), Great Walls of Discourse (2001), The Ethnography of Rhythm (2016), Translation as Citation: Zhuangzi Inside Out (2017), Are We Comparing Yet? (2019), The Making of Barbarians: Chinese Literature in Multilingual Asia (forthcoming, 2022) and the edited collections Sinographies (2007), Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization (2008), and Partner to the Poor: A Paul Farmer Reader (2010). As translator, he has produced versions of works by Jean Métellus (When the Pipirite Sings, 2019) and Tino Caspanello (Bounds, 2020), among others. He is a former Guggenheim Fellow, a fellow of the American Academy in Berlin, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

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Samah Selim

Associate Professor of Arabic Language and Literature at Rutgers University

Samah Selim is a scholar and translator of Arabic literature based in the United States. She is the author of The Novel and the Rural Imaginary in Egypt 1880-1985 (Routledge, 2004) and Popular Fiction, Translation and the Nahda in Egypt (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). She was awarded the Saif Ghobash-Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation in 2009 and the Arkansas Arabic Translation Award in 2011. Her most recent translation is Arwa Salih’s The Stillborn: Notebooks of a Woman from the Student Movement Generation in Egypt (Seagull Books, 2018).  Selim teaches at Rutgers University’s Department of African, Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Literatures.

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Russell Valentino

Professor and Department Chair, Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures at Indiana University Bloomington

Russell Scott Valentino has authored two scholarly monographs, co-edited three literary and scholarly collections, and translated eight books of fiction and literary nonfiction from Italian, Russian, and Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian into English, including Fulvio Tomizza’s Materada, Carlo Michelstaedter’s Persuasion and Rhetoric, and Predrag Matvejević’s The Other Venice. His essays and short translations have appeared in The New York Times, Modern Fiction Studies, Defunct, The Buenos Aires Review, Slavic Review, 91st Meridian, and elsewhere. He is the recipient of two Fulbright research awards, three National Endowment for the Arts translation grants, a PEN/Heim translation award, and institutional grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the U.S. Department of State, and the U.S. Department of Education. He served as Editor-in-Chief at The Iowa Review from 2009 to 2013 and as President of the American Literary Translators Association from 2013 to 2016. He is professor of Slavic and East European languages and cultures and adjunct professor of comparative literature at Indiana University Bloomington. His translation of Bosnian author Miljenko Jergović’s historical saga Kin was published by Archipelago Books in June 2021.

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Questions? Email sean.cotter@utdallas.edu