Speakers at the Translation! Festival 2022
Aiden Power
Dyfodiaith: Iaith Bwystnon / Language Plague
I grew up in West Cork, Ireland. After completing a PhD in Film Studies in 2012, I worked at universities in Germany and Ireland, before joining the University of Exeter in 2018. I have published books on science fiction and am particularly interested in the relationships between film and socio-political, economic and environmental crises.
Alice Farris
Transcultural Devon
Alice Farris is a Lecturer in the Modern Languages and Cultures Department where she teaches Italian language. She graduated at the Scuola Superiore di Lingue Moderne per Interpreti e Traduttori (SSLMIT) of Trieste in Italy where she specialised in interpreting as well as in translation. During her MA in Translation Studies and Tesol (University of Hull) she developed an interest in film subtitling, in particular the subtitling of English humour. She is part of the teaching team for the ‘Transcultural Devon’ module.
Alice Guthrie
Getting our hands dirty: what’s so special about feminist translation (and translating feminists)?
Alice Guthrie is an independent queer feminist translator, editor, and curator, specialising in contemporary Arabic writing. Her work often focuses on subaltern voices and activist art. She is currently compiling the first ever anthology of LGBTQIA+ Arab(ic) literary writing, set to appear in parallel Arabic and English editions in 2023. She occasionally teaches undergrad and postgrad literary translation at the University of Exeter and the University of Birmingham, and most recently in Casablanca for Olive Writers.
Alice Tetley-Paul
European Jewish Writers in Translation
Alice Tetley-Paul translates from Dutch and German. She holds an MA in Literary Translation from UEA and is currently the Translator in Residence for the New Dutch Writing campaign. She recently co-translated My Name is Selma, the memoir of Jewish Resistance fighter and Ravensbrück survivor Selma van de Perre.
Amy Watts
Subtitling Spain
Amy Watts is currently pursuing an MA in Translation Studies at the University of Exeter, U.K, working from Spanish into English. Alongside the MA she has so far gained valuable work experience translating for Latin American Literature Today, subtitling for the ‘Subtitling World Cinema’ project and project management with Cadenza Academic Translations. She previously attended the University of Sussex, U.K, where she gained an BA in English Literature. She has lived in Buenos Aires and Barcelona and is now based in the U.K.
Anam Zafar
The Journey of an Academic Translation: Q&A with the Cadenza Academic Translations Team
Anam is an in-house editor at Cadenza Academic Translations, with a focus on international development, politics, the Middle East and the environment. Her language pairs are Arabic>English and French>English. She studied BA French and Arabic at the University of Exeter (graduated 2018, with a year abroad in Jordan) and MA Applied Translation Studies at the University of Leeds (graduated 2020). She spent some time as a freelance translator and a UN intern before joining the Cadenza team.
Anna Blasiak
European Jewish Writers in Translation
Anna Blasiak is a poet, translator, journalist and literature co-ordinator of the European Literature Network. Anna writes poetry in Polish and in English. Her bilingual poetry and photography book (with Lisa Kalloo) Kawiarnia przy St James’s Wrena w porze lunchu / Café by Wren’s St-James-in-the-Fields, Lunchtime is out from Holland House Books. Lili. Lili Stern-Pohlmann in conversation in Anna Blasiak is also out now.
Photo credit: Lisa Kalloo
Arabella Bond
The Journey of an Academic Translation: Q&A with the Cadenza Academic Translations Team
Arabella joined Cadenza as Project Manager in 2015. Her role with Cadenza involves client communication, team enrolment, workflows, accounting, resolving technical issues and liaising with the in- and out- of house collaborators. In all, she relishes the daily challenges and the multitude of different tasks that arise day to day.
Becky Evans
Real Life Translation: Learn from the Professionals
Becky Evans MA MCIL AITI is a professional translator working from German, Italian and French into English and is a specialist in technical marketing and post-editing. She has been working as a freelance translator for four years from Torbay and is also a trained conference interpreter. She is the joint coordinator of the Institute of Translation and Interpreting’s South West Network along with Claire Thompson.
Bettina Ransley
Transcreation Workshop: The Art of Marketing Translation
Bettina Ransley is a German Junior Translator at AJT, a translation agency specialising in marketing and corporate translations. She has a law degree (Mag.iur.) from the University of Vienna and an MA in Translation Studies from the University of Exeter. Before transitioning to a career in translation, Bettina gained valuable experience in the legal sector, which also shaped one of her special interests: legal translation.
Chantal Wright
European Jewish Writers in Translation
Chantal Wright teaches literary translation in the Warwick Writing Programme at the University of Warwick, and translates from German and French into English. She was awarded the inaugural Cliff Becker Book Prize in Translation, was twice shortlisted for the Marsh Award for Children’s Literature in Translation, and has been a recipient of a PEN/Heim Translation Grant. She has a particular interest in the work of writers who adopt a literary language other than their mother tongue.
Chen Yao
Translating and Performing Shakespeare in a Global Context: A Chinese Perspective
I am currently a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at Peking University in Beijing, China. I am working on a Chinese commentary on Shakespeare’s Othello. I am especially interested in how the topos of memento mori appeared in the late Middle Ages were assimilated by the Elizabethans and staged by the Elizabethan Dramas.
Claire Beaugrand
Languages, Scripts and the Politics of Translation
Claire Beaugrand is lecturing in the Sociology of the Gulf and the Arabian Peninsula at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter. Fluent in Arabic, her research focuses on the socio-genesis of nationality, citizenship and statelessness in the Gulf and now deals with the sociology of Gulf elites and their interconnexion with London.
Claire Suttie
Getting Started as a Translator
Clare Suttie has run Atlas Translations Ltd since 1991, offering a full range of language services. She is an expert in project management – including urgent work and unusual languages, and encourages the promotion of professional linguistic services and languages in education. Atlas offers training programmes for translation service users and providers, as well as training for translators, interpreters and Project Managers. Atlas has run a Work Placement Student Programme since 1993.
Claire Thompson
Real-Life Translation: Learn from the Professionals
Clare Suttie has run Atlas Translations Ltd since 1991, offering a full range of language services. She is an expert in project management – including urgent work and unusual languages, and encourages the promotion of professional linguistic services and languages in education. Atlas offers training programmes for translation service users and providers, as well as training for translators, interpreters and Project Managers. Atlas has run a Work Placement Student Programme since 1993.
Clémence Scalbert
Languages, Scripts and the Politics of Translation
Clémence Scalbert is senior lecturer in Ethnopolitics and Kurdish Studies at the University of Exeter where she has been working since 2007. She has a background in geography and Kurdish language and literature. Her research has focused on Kurdish language policies, cultural production, literature, and translation.
Daniella Pinkstein
European Jewish Writers in Translation
Daniella Pinkstein trained as a linguist and has worked as a journalist, consultant in French and European political and institutional firms, translator and editor. Following a doctoral scholarship, she moved to Hungary to study the history of Hungarian Jews. As a writer. Que cherchent-ils au Ciel, tous ces aveugles ? (Editions MEO) examined the collapsed hopes of Europe, while her next novel (to be published in May by Biblieurope), Jérusalem, par une rosée de lumières, (Jerusalem in a Dew of Lights) secretly dreams of an unheard-of future. She is a regular contributor to the Institute Elie Wiesel (Paris), and the European Jewish Cultural and Academic Centre (Espace Culturel et Universitaire Juif d’Europe – Paris), for whom she organizes colloquiums and conferences on Jewish writers, poets and thinkers. She contributes to various literary or Jewish journals, including Etudes du CRIF.
Dory Sontheimer
European Jewish Writers in Translation
Dory Sontheimer was born in Barcelona and was raised Catholic. She subsequently learnt that she was Jewish and that her family had escaped from Nazi Germany. Following the discovery of seven boxes in her former home containing photos, letters and documents about her family, Dory has written two books, Les Set Caixes (Angle Editorial, 2014) and La Vuitena Caixa (Capital Books, 2017) about her family and their fate.
Edward Mills
Learn French (and English!) with a Thirteenth-Century Knight
Edward Mills is a Lecturer in Medieval Studies at the University of Exeter, where he teaches in the Departments of History and Modern Languages and Cultures. His teaching and research covers a broad swathe of medieval cultural studies, with a particular focus on medieval French language and literature and (within this) the use of the French language in medieval England.
Dr Eliana Maestri
The Dostoevsky Project / Printmaking as Translation: Working with Words in Art and Design / Transcultural Devon / Subtitling Spain
Eliana Maestri is Senior Lecturer in Translation Studies and Director of the Centre for Translating Cultures, University of Exeter. Her research focuses on the interplay between translation, mobility, gender, and visual culture. She was the recipient of a British Academy Award to co-organise the 2019 Exeter Translation Festival and of a 2019 Europe Network Grant (Global Partnerships, Exeter) with KU Leuven, Belgium, to study street art. Previous awards include a EUOSSIC Erasmus Mundus Post-Doctoral Fellowship (2011-12), University of Sydney and University of Bath, and a MEEUC Research Fellowship (2014), Monash University, Melbourne. She has published on visions of Europe among migrants in Australia, on translations of mobile traditions into Italian Australian folk music (with Rita Wilson) and translations of languages and cityscapes into the visual arts, with particular attention to prominent artist Jon Cattapan. Her monograph Translating the Female Self across Cultures appeared in the 2018 John Benjamins Translation Library.
Femmetje De Wind
European Jewish Writers in Translation
Femmetje de Wind studied both Law and Comparative Art History at the University of Amsterdam. She is an author, publisher, and journalist. She is also the founder of Jackie magazine, which she edited for seven years. Her debut novel Rivka, published in (2015) which is partially based on her father’s experiences during the second world war, received much praise. Het Beloofde Leven (The Promised Life) is her second novel.
Francesco Goglia
Exhibition, The Languages Local to You
Francesco Goglia is Associate Professor of Migration and Multilingualism in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures at the University of Exeter. His research interests are multilingualism, language maintenance and shift, and language contact in immigrant communities in particular in Italy, UK, East Timor and Australia. His current research, supported by the Leverhulme Trust, focuses on the process of onward migration from Italy to the UK and its sociolinguistic implications.
Dr Freya Cox Jensen
Dr Freyja Cox Jensen is a Senior Lecturer in the History Department. She has recently been working on translation in early modern Europe, chiefly focusing on translations of ancient histories, but also exploring the translation of texts between manuscript, print, and performance media.
Guy Elhanan
Bilingual Arabic-Hebrew Theatre Practice and Teaching
Guy Elhanan is a PHD student at Exeter University, Drama Department, UK. He is doing his practice-based PhD project from Israel, on the topic of Bilingual Arabic-Hebrew theatre practice and teaching. He teaches Acting at the Western Galilee College in Acco, Israel. After a three years military service, Elhanan had left Israel. Wondering the Americas for a year, he came to Paris, France and studied at the Jacques Lecoq International Theatre School, and got his BA at the Saint-Denis University. While in France, Elhanan was part of a theatre group of Middle Eastern immigrants who toured the country in shows directly relating to current reality and to personal childhood stories. Upon his return to Jerusalem, in 2007, and after studying Arabic, he started teaching at the Arab-Jewish Bilingual School. He has been teaching all ages since, toddlers, university and elderly students, and acting in cinema and on stage, participating in children’s plays and directing his own material for the past ten years, both in Arabic and in Hebrew, Elhanan has performed in acclaimed films such as Mars at Sunrise (Netflix) and at important theatres such as the Theatre Du Soleil (Paris).
Dr Helena Taylor
Dr Helena Taylor is a Leverhulme Research Fellow in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures. Her research looks at practices of translation in early modern Europe, particularly France, with a special focus on translation of classical texts and translation by women. She is currently co-running a project looking into these questions with colleagues at Exeter and KU Leuven in Belgium.
Helen Vassallo
Getting our hands dirty: what’s so special about feminist translation (and translating feminists)?
Helen Vassallo is the founder of Translating Women, a research project that bridges academic and industry contexts, assessing and challenging the barriers faced by women’s writing in translation. She translates Francophone women’s writing (with particular focus on North Africa and the Middle East), and has recently published translations of Darina Al Joundi’s The Day Nina Simone Stopped Singing and Marseillaise My Way. Helen is Senior Lecturer in French at the University of Exeter.
Hugh Roberts
Taking Flight in a Climate Crisis: Image ̶ Word ̶ Birdsong
Hugh Roberts is Professor of French at the University of Exeter who has growing interests in creative translation. His principal teaching interests are on the intersection of philosophy and literature while his research interests include literary nonsense, obscenity and the reception of ancient Cynicism in the French Renaissance.
Dr James Downs
Language, Scripts and the Politics of Translation
Dr James Downs has been Archivist of the University of Exeter’s Middle East collections since July 2018. With a background in archives and rare book librarianship, he has published three books and over 40 articles and reviews in journals including Ancient Egypt, the Innes Review, Magdalen College Record and Studies in Photography on various aspects of the history of book illustration, film and photography, monasticism, antiquarian scholarship and religious culture.
Katarzyna Hoffmann
Transcreation Workshop: The Art of Marketing Translation
With an MA in Translation Studies from the University of Exeter and a BA in Teaching French and English as a Foreign Language from the University of Warsaw, Katarzyna is working as a Junior Project Manager at AJT, a translation agency specialising in marketing and corporate translations. Born in Poland, and having previously lived in France and Belgium, she speaks Polish, French and English, and is currently studying Portuguese.
Kate Cameron
Taking Flight in a Climate Crisis: Image ̶ Word ̶ Birdsonng
Kate Cameron had a bilingual education in French and English, living in Belgium as a child. She studied Theatre and Dance at Dartington College of Arts, followed by an MA in French Literary Translation at the University of Exeter. She has been a lecturer in French Language and Performing Arts for 20 years. She is a dancer, singer and percussionist, and performs regularly with musicians and bands across musical genres, from Cajun to Classical.
Katie Brown
Colaboratorio Ávila: A Transatlantic Translation Collective
Katie Brown is a Senior Lecturer in Latin American Studies at the University of Exeter. She specializes in contemporary Latin American culture, with a particular focus on Venezuela. Her main research interests are the circulation of people (travel, migration and exile) and of texts (publishing, cultural policy and translation). She also researches and teaches about intermediality and cultural responses to politics in the 20th and 21st century. She runs venezuelanvoices.exeter.ac.uk
Katy Humberstone
Dyfodiaith: Iaith Bwystnon / Language Plague / Exhibition: The Languages Local to You
I am a first-year doctoral student in the department of Modern Languages here at the University of Exeter. My research focuses on contemporary identity in the Cornish-Mexican diaspora of Hidalgo, Mexico, to which Cornish miners historically migrated. I have broad interests spanning Sociolinguistics (particularly those of small languages), Social Semiotics, Heritage, and Visual Culture. My research is kindly funded by the SWWDTP2 (South, West & Wales Doctoral Training Partnership).
Kensa Broadhurst
Translation in Learning Cornish
Kensa Broadhurst is a third year PhD student at the Institute of Cornish Studies, part of Exeter University. Her studies are funded by the Cornwall Heritage Trust and the Q Fund. Kensa is researching the status of the Cornish language between 1777-1904, that is, the period in which it is widely believed to have been extinct. A former modern languages teacher, Kensa is a fluent speaker of Cornish, a bard of the Cornish Gorsedh, and both teaches and examines the language.
Majida Ibrahim
Getting our hands dirty: what’s so special about feminist translation (and translating feminists)?
Majida Ibrahim is an Arabic-English translator/interpreter with an experience in working in translation in many countries: UK, Syria, Qatar, Oman and Vietnam. Majida holds an MSc in Translation and Conference Interpreting from Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh/Scotland, in which she looked at the concept of equivalence in Hanan Al-Shaykh’s novel ‘the Story of Zahra’. Majida’s main research interests are translation and interpreting, gender studies, linguistics, Arabic literature and language, Arabic musicology, English literature, and Islamic studies.
María Gracia Pardo
Colaboratorio Ávila: A Transatlantic Translation Collective
María Gracia Pardo teaches Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American literature and culture. After obtaining her PhD from the University of Miami with a study devoted to children’s literature and Childhood Studies, she received the Barrett Award for Best Dissertation on Latin America (2014). She has published articles on the tropes used to represent childhood in film, literature and political thought. She is currently researching the paradox of nonfiction or the ways in which misinformation and mistrust can spread precisely through the media and genres purported to be factful.
María Florencia Fernandez
Subtitling Spain / The Journey of an Academic Translation: Q&A with the Cadenza Academic Translations Team
Flor has an MA in Translation Studies graduate at the University of Exeter. After exploring the ins and outs of literary translation into Spanish during her MA year, she now has a full-time role at Exeter-based Cadenza Academic Translations as Project Manager and Spanish editor – a dual role full of exciting challenges and opportunities to learn and grow.
Mark Mellor
Evil Words
Mark studied European literature at the University of Essex, Anglo-Saxon Philology at Madrid Complutense, and Philosophy at University College London. He founded Cadenza Academic Translations in 2011. The primacy of human over machine translation and ethics in translation are among his chief interests.
Martin Sorrell
Taking Flight in a Climate Crisis: Image ̶ Word ̶ Birdsong
Martin Sorrell taught French at Exeter University, where he co-founded the MA in Translation. He has published translations of Verlaine, Rimbaud, Apollinaire, and Lorca for OUP, Molière for Nick Hern Books, and more besides. He has also written plays, stories, and features for BBC Radio.
Matt Burden
The Journey of an Academic Translation: Q&A with the Cadenza Academic Translations Team
Matt Burden has been an Editor at Cadenza Academic Translations since 2019, after graduating from the MA in Translation Studies at the University of Exeter. His language pairs are French to English and Spanish to English, and his areas of interest include history, politics, and the media. As part of the ‘Subtitling World Cinema’ project, he co-subtitled the film El mundo sigue (1963).
Muireann Maguire
The Dostoevsky Project
Muireann Maguire is Professor of Russian at the University of Exeter and a freelance literary translator from Russian to English. She is the editor and translator of Red Spectres (Outlook, 2013) and White Magic (Russian Life, 2021), both collections of twentieth-century Russian ghost stories. Her academic interests include childbirth narrative in literature; the history of Russian-to-English literary translation; and Russian prose literature since the mid-19th century. Her most recent academic book is Reading Backwards: An Advance Retrospective on Russian Literature (Open Book, 2021), co-edited with Timothy Langen. She is the lead scholar of the European Research-Council funded RusTrans research project, which investigates the political aspects of literary translation from Russian.
Oliver Ready
The Dostoevsky Project
Oliver Ready is a literary translator and scholar. He is Research Fellow in Russian Literature and Culture at St Antony’s, and has taught undergraduates at Oxford for many years. His translations include Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (Penguin; shortlisted for the Pen Translation Prize in 2016), stories by Nikolai Gogol under the title And the Earth Will Sit on the Moon (Pushkin Press) and, from more recent Russian fiction, books by Yuri Buida and Vladimir Sharov for Dedalus, three of which have received translation prizes (the Rossica prize and two Read Russia awards). He is the author of Persisting in Folly: Russian Writers in Search of Wisdom, 1963-2013 (Peter Lang, 2017), and is currently at work on a study of Nikolai Gogol for the Critical Lives series published by Reaktion Press.
Olivia Morton
Getting Started as a Translator
Olivia Morton has been providing freelance translation services from German into English since 2018. She is a qualified member of the Institute of Translation and Interpreting and a member of the Chartered Institute of Linguists. She specialises in providing language services to companies operating in the fields of jewellery and luxury goods and particularly enjoys working on marketing and corporate communications projects. Olivia primarily assists her clients with translation, proofreading, editing and transcreation.
Patrycja Dolowy
European Jewish Writers in Translation
Patrycja Dolowy is an artist, writer and activist. For the last 13 years she has been interested in the problems of memory and Jewish heritage. She bases her projects on oral history and testimonies, interviewing witnesses to history and their descendants. She is the author and co-author of books, essays and performances. Since 2011 she has conducted on-going performance in public spaces called “Views: Memory of the City/Memory of the Body”. She is a lecturer at Artes Liberales, Warsaw University and is the head of the Centre for Innovative Science Education in Warsaw.
Photo Credit: Nikolaj Starzynski
Paul Eastwood
Dyfodiaith: Iaith Bwystnon / Language Plague
Paul Eastwood treats art as a form of material storytelling. He creates imagined histories and futures to investigate how spaces, artifacts, and memory communicate identities. Language – fleeting or imprinted, natural or invented, hegemonic or minority – is a constant object and medium of his practice. Eastwood was educated at Wimbledon School of Arts and the Royal Academy Schools. He was the winner of the inaugural NOVA Art Prize, Wales in 2018, and held a fellowship as Creative Wales Fellow at the British School at Rome in 2020.
Peter Stott
Choosing Words to Save the Planet
Peter Stott is a Professor in the Mathematics Department of the University of Exeter, a Science Fellow of the Met Office and recipient of the 2018 Climate Science Communication Award of the Royal Meteorological Society. His book Hot Air: The Inside Story of the Battle Against Climate Change was published by Atlantic Books in 2021.
Pierrette Thomet
Choosing Words to Save the Planet
Pierrette Thomet, Dipl ETI (Translation) University of Geneva, and BA Music University of Reading is a freelance artist and musician and recipient of the 2014 Michael Hunt Award of the Royal Meteorological Society as well as the 2015 Outreach and Communication Award of the European Meteorological Society.
Rachel Beaney
Subtitling Spain
Rachel Beaney is a PhD student at the University of Exeter and Cardiff University. In 2016, she was the recipient of a scholarship from Cardiff University and completed a research masters, with a dissertation focused on the child in contemporary Spanish horror cinema. In 2018, she began her PhD thesis on the orphan child in contemporary Spanish cinema, supervised by Professor Sally Faulkner and Dr. Ryan Prout. She is pursuing doctoral studies thanks to a grant from the Southwest and Wales Doctoral Training Partnership, Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).
Rachel Toogood
European Jewish Writers in Translation
Rachel Toogood is a freelance translator and producer. Her most recent translations are Shopping Centre Paradise and The Glass Ceiling:Anne & Sylvia both by Laura Rubio Galletero, and Rongo, The Unknown Story of Easter Island by Patricia Štambuk, published by Pehuén. She has also worked as a producer and project manager for several internationally renowned organisations and festivals such as the Southbank Centre, the Royal Court Theatre, Japan Now and New Dutch Writing.
Raquel Rivas Rojas
Colaboratorio Ávila: A Transatlantic Translation Collective
Raquel Rivas Rojas is a writer, researcher, editor, translator and educator. In her academic work, Rivas Rojas has published the books Sujetos, actos y textos de una identidad (1998), Bulla y buchiplumeo. Masificación cultural y recepción letrada en la Venezuela Gomecista (2002) and Narrar en dictadura (2011). As a creative writer, she has published the short story collection El patio del vecino (2013) and two crime novels Muerte en el Guaire (2016) and El accidente (2018). Her poetry translations frequently appear in Papel Literario.
Professor Sally Faulkner
Subtitling Spain
Sally is Film Studies scholar and, working from bases in both Film and Languages & Cultures, specialize in Spanish- and Portuguese-language cinemas. In her undergraduate and postgraduate teaching and research supervision, Sally covers film and TV from both Europe and Latin America. Her research largely focuses on Spanish cinema, with particular interests in film and politics (especially under dictatorship and during the Transition to democracy), film aesthetics (the practice of close reading and questions of intermediality) and film theory (especially post-colonial theory and gender).
Dr Sally Flint
Taking Flight in a Climate Crisis: Image ̶ Word ̶ Birdsong
Dr Sally Flint lectures in Creative Writing & Publishing and is co-founder/editor of Riptide Press based at the University of Exeter. Her writing has been widely anthologised/published, and she has designed / facilitated many successful creative writing courses and projects. With Met Office Scientists she researches ‘Creative Approaches to Scientific Writing’. Collaborations have resulted in Climate Stories, Climate Matters and, most recently, with Climate Scientists and Health Professionals, curated climate poetry for G7/Green Futures conference- and created One Chance Left, which was showcased in the Science Pavilion and with Arctic Basecamp at COP26 and beyond.
Suzy Bott
The Journey of an Academic Translation: Q&A with the Cadenza Academic Translations Team
Suzy has been an in-house editor at Cadenza Academic Translations since September 2021. Her language pairs are French>English and Spanish>English. She joined Cadenza following the completion of an MA in Translation and Professional Language Skills at the University of Bath and a BA in Modern Languages and Cultures at Durham University. While she enjoys working on the wide array of topics covered at Cadenza, her particular interests lie in linguistics and literature, gender studies, and social and cultural studies.
Tom Hinton
Learn French (and English!) with a Thirteenth-Century Knight
Tom Hinton is Senior Lecturer in French at the University of Exeter, and Principal Investigator on the Learning French in Medieval England project. His wider research interests include the development of Francophone literary culture, troubadour lyric, Arthurian romance, and history of the book.
Tom Stennett
Ideology, Context and Translation
Tom completed his DPhil at St. Anne’s College, Oxford in 2021. His thesis was on the quirky Mozambican-based Portuguese poet and painter António Quadros (1933-1994), who published literary texts under three pennames: Ioannes Garabatus, a bawdy 16th-century friar; Grabato Dias, an anti-colonial decadent poet; and, Mutimati Barnabé João, a guerrilla soldier. His current project examines the interconnections between party politics and literature in Mozambique and Angola during the late colonial period and after.
Tomer Dotan-Dreyfus
European Jewish Writers in Translation
Tomer Dotan-Dreyfus is an Israeli-born author, poet and translator. Although Hebrew is his native language, he has lived in Berlin for over a decade and writes mainly in German. He holds a BA and MA degrees from the Free University of Berlin, both in Comparative Literature and Philosophy, his thesis presented a research into the singularities of the letter O. His recent translations from German to Hebrew include Walter Benjamin, Vilem Flusser and Mascha Kaleko, recent publications of original poetry include five poems in the anthology Was Es Bedeuten Soll (2019) and five poems in the 21st edition of the journal Triëdere (2020). Dotan-Dreyfus received a working stipend of the Berliner Senate for German-language writers in 2020 for his first novel Birobidzhan.
Valentina Todino
Transcultural Devon
Valentina Todino is Honorary Research Fellow and Associate Lecturer at the University of Exeter. Her work is on cultural translation and identity. She is also part of the teaching staff of our ‘Transcultural Devon’ module, Modern Languages and Cultures, as Community Liaison Officer. Valentina also organizes cultural events on behalf of the Italian Cultural Association Exeter.
Valeria Brancaforte
The Dostoevsky Project / Printmaking as Translation: Working with Words in Art and Design
Born in Catania, Sicily, I graduated in Slavic Languages and Literatures from the Università di Milano, Italy. As a student, while moving my first steps in the translation world, I practised linocut on my own. In 1990, self-publishing my first book on a short text by L. Tolstoy was the first of a long series of works, marking the beginning of my professional career in relief print and book-making. I have been living and working in Barcelona, Spain, since 2003.
Vineet Lal
European Jewish Writers in Translation
Vineet Lal is a literary translator of French novels and a conference interpreter. Based in Edinburgh, he has an MSc in Translation and Conference Interpreting from Heriot Watt University (Edinburgh). He attended the British Centre for Literary Translation (BCLT) Summer School, and was awarded one of the first-ever BCLT/Translators Association’s Emerging Translator Mentorships with the prizewinning translator Sarah Ardizzone. His publications include Lacrimosa by Régis Jauffret, as well as a collection of short stories by emerging French children’s authors, Rising Stars!.
Quanling Dong
Speech Bubbles
Quanling is from Henan, China and her undergraduate degree is in Art and Design. She is currently studying for an MA in Curatorial Studies at the University of Exeter. She spent some time interning at the Henan Provincial Museum in China and is currently doing an internship at Art Work Exeter.
Wang Xiao
Translating and Performing Shakespeare in a Global Context: A Chinese Perspective
Wang Xiao is now a PhD candidate in the English Department at the University of Exeter. His research focuses on early modern literature (especially Shakespeare) and translation studies. His current PhD thesis aims to reveal Shakespeare’s interaction with the English gentleman as a Renaissance ideal through an investigation of his intimacy with the early modern gentry.
Wenyan Pu
Translating and Performing Shakespeare in a Global Context: A Chinese Perspective
Wenyan Pu is a PGR student in Drama at the University of Exeter and holds a Master of Arts in Drama from the Central Academy of Drama in Beijing, China. Her PhD project focuses on comic cross-dressing in English pantomime and Chinese traditional theatre. Her research interests include Western contemporary theatre, Chinese traditional theatre, and popular culture.
Yixuan Gao
Translating and Performing Shakespeare in a Global Context: A Chinese Perspective
I am a PhD candidate in Theatre Studies of Department of English Language and Literature, National University of Singapore. As part of my ongoing doctoral research, I am interested in how theatrical performance and language translation are interrelated.
Zahira Ransome
The Journey of an Academic Translation: Q&A with the Cadenza Academic Translations Team
Having completed a BA in English and French and an MA in South Asia Area Studies, I then sat the CIOL Dip Trans exam and became a translator and editor. I have extensive experience working with French, Spanish and English texts in the international cooperation and academic sectors.
Zixian Xu
Zixian Xu is PhD student at Peking University in China. His interests include sixteenth-century English poetry, prose writings, drama (Shakespeare in particular), selfhood, and comparative literature. He is recently working on a commentary on Shakespeare’s sonnets and an article on the integrity of the 1609 volume in the light of late Elizabethan publishing practices.