Speakers at the Translation! Festival 2019
Ali Sizer
Kurdish Language in Translation: My Language is My Mal
Ali Sizer is a Kurdish/ Alevi (Qizilbash) dengbej (bard singer), narrator, poet, musician, TV and radio personality. He writes and composes music largely in Kurdish (Kurmanci) as well as in Turkish in Alevi/Qizilbash tradition.
Ali is from Adiyaman district of Eastern Turkey. He relocated to the UK in 2016 and recently he began to divide his time between Swansea and London. He travels around the UK, mostly visiting now 17 Cemevis in different regions in the UK established under British Alevi Federation to teach Alevi children and teenagers about Alevi tradition, culture and music.
Ali describes himself as servant of humanity and describes his musical style as mystic Sufi. Ali says that all his efforts in life is devoted to the oneness of humanity. He considers that we are all the same in our core being and our role in life is to remain in the path for thinking good and doing good to be good.
Alessandra Cianetti
The Long Table: An Open Discussion on Translating Identities
Performing Religions: Translation, Live Art and Exploration of the Sel
Alessandra Cianetti is a London-based curator, creative producer, and writer. She has worked internationally on multi-disciplinary live and visual art projects across the UK, Europe, and Southeast Asia in partnership with arts organisations, institutions and universities such as the Barbican Centre, the Live Art Development Agency, Tate Britain, South London Gallery, King's College London, Nottingham Trent University, Birkbeck University, City of Skopje, Ikona Gallery Venice, FEFÈ Project Rome. Her activities have been supported, among others, by the Arts Council England, the European Cultural Foundation, National Arts Council Singapore, and the Fire Station Artists’ Studios Dublin. From 2013 to 2018 Alessandra has been co-director of the London-based arts organisation Something Human. She is the founder of the curatorial research platform performingborders.live.
Website: https://alessandracianetti.com/projects/
Photo credit: Tunda Euba
Alexander Bubb
Annotating the Orient: Nineteenth-Century Readers and their Copies of Translated Literature from Asia
The Global Bookshelf: Treasured Copies of Your Favourite Texts From Around the World
Dr Alexander Bubb is a Senior Lecturer in English at Roehampton University in London. In 2016 he published his first book, Meeting Without Knowing It: Kipling and Yeats at the Fin de Siècle, a comparative study of the two poets in the 1890s. Currently he is writing his second book on popular, accessible English translations, made for the Victorian general reader, of classic literary texts from Asia.
Alison Exley
Translating with the Professionals - with the ITI South West
Alison studied German and Swedish at Newcastle University and has worked as a freelance German-English translator for the last 17 years, specialising in legal, banking and finance. Before moving back to the UK she was based in Essen, Germany, for 16 years. Before entering the translation profession she worked as an administrator for Wintershall, Coca Cola, Guinness and a German branch of NatWest Bank.
Amber Woods
Translation! Festival 2019: Languages in Motion co-organiser
Amber Woods is a soon-to-be MA Translation Studies graduate with Italian and Spanish, and co-organiser of Translation! Festival 2019: Languages in Motion as an intern. Amber has a BSc in Conservation Biology and discovered her love of Italian while working in Palermo. She aspires to be either a literary translator or specialise in ecology related texts. Or both!
Ana Ricca
Translating with the Professionals - with the ITI South West
ANA RICCA BA (Hons) MA FCCA MCIL AITI: Ana is an English and Spanish freelance translator based in Plymouth. After graduating with a BA in English in Spain, she moved to the UK in 1992. Shortly after, she became a chartered certified accountant and worked for over 20 years with global companies across a variety of industries. She has an MA in Translation Studies and specialises in commercial, business, legal and finance translation.
Andrea Ciribuco
I Say Dumpling, You Say Ravioli/Pierogi/Gyoza: A Conversation on Migration, Food and Translation
Andrea Ciribuco completed his PhD at the National University of Ireland, Galway in 2016, with a thesis on Italian-American author and translator Emanuel Carnevali. A monograph based on the thesis is set to appear in 2019.
Since October 2017, he is postdoctoral research fellow at NUI Galway, funded by the Irish Research Council and Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions. His current project investigates life narratives, translation and untranslatability in Italy in the context of the contemporary migration and refugee crisis.
Andrea Reece
Live Translation: The Spectacular Translation Machine (With Graphic Novels Les Culotées and La rivoluzione dei gelsomini)
What Makes a Good Translation? A Conversation with Award-Winning Literary Translators Andrea Reece and Daniel Hahn
Andrea Reece is a freelance translator from French and Spanish. She completed at MA in Literary Translation at the University of Exeter in 2013. Her latest published translation First, They Erased Our Name A Rohingya Speaks by Habiburahman and Sophie Ansel (Scribe, 2019) recently won a Pen Translates Award.
Anja Jones
Creative Translation and Transcreation: A Workshop with Professional Translators
Anja Jones is the Managing Director of AJT, a Cornwall-based boutique translation agency specialising in marketing and corporate translations powered by professional human translators. Anja holds a Bachelors degree in Linguistics and French from Sussex University. A native speaker of German, she started her professional translation career as a freelancer in 2010 and has since built a company that employs over 10 in-house staff as well as over 150 freelancers.
Anna Gunin
Chernobyl Prayer: The Alchemy of Translation
Riddles in Russian Translation: From Samovars to Slavic Sounds
Anna Gunin is a translator from Russian of novels and memoirs, films and fairy tales, plays and poetry. She is the co-translator of Chernobyl Prayer by Svetlana Alexievich. Among her many translations are Oleg Pavlov’s award-winning Requiem for a Soldier, Mikail Eldin’s war memoirs The Sky Wept Fire and Pavel Bazhov’s folk tales in Russian Magic Tales from Pushkin to Platonov.
Beloved Sara Zaltash
Performing Religions: Translation, Live Art and Exploration of the Self
Beloved Sara Zaltash serves across disciplines, ideologies and theologies. Her bespoke spectacles, ceremonies, rituals, workshops, one-to-one consultations and writing are interwoven with her candid, entertaining and lyrical exuberance. Her output sits, for now, in one of the following projects: Approaches to Embodied Islam, Divination for Justice, Ministry of Us and In Excelsis Productions. Beloved Sara Zaltash is a Research Fellow of the Schumacher Institute and Associate Fellow of St Ethelburga's Centre for Reconciliation and Peace.
Photo credit: Melissa Tofton
Cari Bottois
A Conversation with Professionals: How Should We Support Language Volunteers?
Cari Bottois is a trustee and coordinator for Charity Translators, a growing network of multilingual volunteers supporting our charity sector. Cari describes herself as an accidental translator because her bilingual skills have come through roots in both North Wales and Normandy, which naturally led to many unexpected opportunities for translation/interpreting during her career in the private and public sectors. However, her enthusiasm for translation only sparked in 2011 when it came together with her passion for charity work after becoming a volunteer translator for a Devon-based charity. Since then she has completed an MA in Translation at Exeter University to support her voluntary work and has accidentally become an independent researcher, community leader and activist.
Cathy Dobson
Translating with the Professionals - with the ITI South West
Cathy has been working as a French to English translator since 2006. She holds the Chartered Institute of Linguists Diploma in Translation and a Masters in Translation from the University of Exeter. She specialises in translating commercial texts and marketing copy for companies in the wine, fashion, beauty, charity and environmental sectors.
Cathy McAteer
The Riddle of Russian Translation: From Samovars to Slavic Sounds
Cathy McAteer is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Exeter for the ERC-funded project: The Dark Side of Translation: 20th and 21st Century Translation from Russian as a Political Phenomenon in the UK, Ireland and the USA (see: http://rustrans.exeter.ac.uk/ and Twitter @Rustransdark). Cathy’s doctoral research is in classic Russian literature in English translation during the twentieth century, specifically Penguin's Russian Classics. She has taught Russian-English translation at MA level since 2013.
Chloe Paver
Translating the Museum for People with Learning Disabilities: Introducing Easyread
Chloe Paver is Associate Professor of German at the University of Exeter. Her research focuses on German history museums and their role in shaping German memory of the past. Amongst other things she is interested in how history museums are making their exhibitions more accessible to people with learning difficulties by translating text into ‘leichte Sprache’, the German equivalent of Easyread.
Claire Turner
Translating with the Professional- with the ITI South West
Claire Turner is a solicitor and translator, offering legal translations services from German to English, working for a range of legal, commercial and public sector clients. She holds the IoLET Diploma in Translation and is an Associate Member of the ITI. In 2017 she won the ITI “Best Newcomer – Freelancing” award.
Clemence Scalbert-Yucel
Kurdish Language is My Mal
Constructing the self through writing across languages: an interview with award winning Kurdish writer Nazand Begikhani
Clemence has studied geography at the University of Toulouse-Le Mirail, and political geography at the University of Marne-La-Vallée and Paris IV (France). She gained her PhD in Political Geography at the University of Paris IV- Sorbonne in 2005. Her PhD thesis addressed the question of the development of a Kurdish field of literature in the context of language conflict in Turkey. She also graduated in Kurdish Language and Civilisation at the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales (INALCO) in Paris in 2003. She taught geography at the INALCO from 2003 to 2007, when she joined the University of Exeter.
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Daniel Hahn
What makes a Good Translation? A Conversation with Award-Winning Literary Translators Andrea Reece and Daniel Hahn
Daniel Hahn is a writer, editor and translator with sixty-something books to his name. His translations (from Portuguese, Spanish and French) include books for children and adults, spanning both fiction and non-fiction. His work has won him the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the International Dublin Literary Award and been shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize, among many others. He is a past chair of the UK's Translators Association and the Society of Authors.
Image: John Lawrence ©
Danielle Hipkins
Film Screening: Devon in Translation – Stories of Migration to Devon, Followed by Discussion with Filmmakers
Danielle Hipkins is Associate Professor of Italian Studies and Film at the University of Exeter. She has written widely on gender representation in postwar Italian cinema, and has recently published Italy’s Other Women: Gender and prostitution in postwar Italian cinema, 1940-1965 (Peter Lang, 2016). She is currently working on girl culture, and was a Co-investigator on the AHRC-funded ‘Italian Cinema Audiences’ project, a study of memories of cinema-going in Italy of the 1950s with the Universities of Bristol and Oxford Brookes (2013-2016).
Eliana Maestri
Translation! Festival 2019: Languages in Motion organiser
Confabulations and Other Wordscapes: An Interview with Widely Celebrated Visual Artist Valeria Brancaforte
Eliana Maestri works on the interplay between translation, gender and migration. Inspired by her own life as a migrant, Eliana sees translation as an opportunity to explore the complexities and richness of today's multicultural society. She is intrigued by the pervasiveness of translation as a mode of communication in multilingual settings and as an artistic practice across media. In particular, Eliana looks at Italian Australian visual and performing arts displaying acts of translation and problematising cross-cultural encounters. Eliana loves all sorts of languages, codes of communication and ways of expressing care and love, between people and also animals. Her monograph Translating the Female Self across Cultures was published in the John Benjamins Translation Library in 2018.
Emily Apter
(Un)translatability: An interview with Emily Apter and Mark Mellor
Emily Apter is Julius Silver Professor of French and Comparative Literature at New York University. She earned her BA from Harvard University and PhD from Princeton University. In 2012, she was appointed Remarque-Ecole Normale Supérieure Visiting Professor; she has also taught at the University of California, Los Angeles; UC Davis; Cornell University; and Williams College. Apter was president of the American Comparative Literature Association in 2017-18. She is editor of the book series Translation/Transnation from Princeton University Press, and serves on the editorial boards of Publications of the Modern Languages Association of America, Comparative Literature, October, Diacritics, Sites, and Signs. A 2003 Guggenheim Fellow, Apter was awarded a two-year Mellon Grant (with Jacques Lezra) in 2011-12, for a seminar on “The Problem of Translation.” In fall 2014, she was a Humanities Council Fellow at Princeton University.
Photo credit: Annette Hornischer
Emily Hauser
Trojan Women: Female Adaptations of Ancient Myth
Dr Emily Hauser is Lecturer in Classics at Exeter and specialises in gender in antiquity and women’s classical reception; she also the author of three historical novels, published by Penguin Random House, which rework the stories of women of classical myth.
Ferangis Ghaderi
Kurdish Language in Translation: My Language is My Mal
Constructing the self through writing across languages: an interview with award winning Kurdish writer Nazand Begikhani
Farangis was born in Iran and completed her studies in English literature at the University of Kurdistan and Tehran. She moved to the UK in 2009 and in 2016 earned her PhD in Kurdish Studies from the University of Exeter. Her dissertation examined the development of modern Kurdish poetry from the late nineteenth century to the 1940s. She currently works as a Middle East consultant and independent researcher.
Filiz Çelik
Kurdish Language in Translation: My Language is My Mal
Filiz Çelik is an independent consultant on collective and historical traumas in Turkey and also a Systemic and Family Psychotherapist, an Associate Tutor in Psychology and Counselling for the Department of Adult and Continuing Education at Swansea University; and also an Honorary Research Associate in the Department of Modern Languages, Translation and Interpreting, at Swansea University.
She completed her PhD in 2015 at Birkbeck, University of London, examining the effects psychosocial effects of the Dersim Massacre on both individuals and the related collective, social, and institutional formations.
In recent research she investigated minority languages, linguistic diversity, the provision of interpreting and translation, and practices and process of translanguaging and transculturation in refugee communities in south Wales.
She is member of the Translation and Interpreting Committee of Wales PEN Cymru and works closely with local Kurdish communities, with arts action projects focusing on the use of Kurdish languages in Wales and Kurdish populations’ relationship to the English and Welsh languages.
Harry G. West
I Say Dumpling, You Say Ravioli/Pierogi/Gyoza: A Conversation on Migration, Food and Translation
Harry West is a socio-cultural anthropologist with expertise in political anthropology and the anthropology of food, farming and agrarian society. He has conducted research in Africa, as well as in Europe and North America. He’s currently working on food, heritage and memory, with a focus on artisan cheesemaking. He is also a Co-Director of the Centre for Rural Policy Research.
Helena Taylor
Trojan Women: Female Adaptations of Ancient Myth
Dr Helena Taylor works in the department of French at the University of Exeter; she is currently writing a book on translations and adaptations of classical texts by women in early modern Europe.
Hephzibah Israel
Performing Religions: Translation, Live Art and Exploration of the Self
Annotating the Orient: Nineteenth-century readers and their copies of translated literature from Asia
Hephzibah Israel is Senior Lecturer in Translation Studies, University of Edinburgh. She researches translation and religion, literary translation, literary practice and translation in South Asia. She led an AHRC-funded collaborative research project (2014-16) focusing on the role of translation in the movement of religious concepts across languages and its impacts on autobiographical writing about conversion experiences. Her monograph entitled Religious Transactions in Colonial South India (2011) analyses the translated Bible as an object of cultural transfer in South Asia.
Hervé Éléouet
Performance: La traductrice et la grenouille (The Translator and the Frog)
Hervé Éléouet is an author who has published several collections of novellas and poems. He leads writing workshops and is the mind behind the game 'Poétickets', a poetry competition in which used tickets take centre stage. He often writes about objects or on the streets. Since 2010 he has worked as a public poet: with Adélaïde, his faithful typewriter, he improvises poems in just a couple of minutes on any topic he is given.
Isabel Santafé
Translating with the Professionals - with the ITI South West
A Conversation with Professionals: How Should We Support Language Volunteers?
Isabel Santafé is an Associate Lecturer in Spanish at the University of Exeter. She has been contributing to the Exeter MA Translation since 2012 and is currently a Visiting Lecturer for the Distance Learning MA Translation at the University of Birmingham. She holds a PhD in Translation Studies from the University of Exeter and is a member of the ITI South West committee.
Katarzyna Hoffmann
Translation! Festival 2019: Languages in Motion co-organiser
Katarzyna Hoffmann is a MA Translation Studies student and co-organiser of Translation! Festival 2019: Languages in Motion as an intern. She has done her BA in Teaching French and English as a Foreign Language at the University of Warsaw and worked as a French teacher. Katarzyna is starting her translating career and works as a Polish interpreter at Multilingua Devon. She’s passionate about languages and would love to one day call herself a polyglot: so far she speaks Polish, French and English, and she’s learning Portuguese and Russian.
Image credit: Steve Haywood
Kate Adams
Performance: Μα ποια πάπια (I’m Not a Pheasant Plucker)
Kate Adams makes interdisciplinary performance mixing vulnerability with humour, the personal with political; and movement with text. Kate’s recent work includes two solo performances “And by the Way the Cat is Dead” and “Μα Ποια Πάπια (or I’m not a Pheasant Plucker)”, and she has collaborated with Medie Megas as performer and dramaturg for two major projects in Greece, as well as teaching contemporary performance part time at the University of Salford.
Kate Cameron
Tongue Tied: Performance of Martin Sorrel’s Award-Winning Short Story, Performed by Performance Artist and Musician Kate Cameron (Followed by Discussion)
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
Women Beyond Words: Translating Women’s Experiences Across Media (workshop)
Katie Brown is a Lecturer in Latin American Studies at the University of Exeter, with a focus on contemporary Venezuelan culture (literature, film and visual art), identity and politics. She also translates regularly for Latin American Literature Today and co-edited the anthology Crude Words: Contemporary Writing from Venezuela (2016). Katie is one of the co-organisers of Migrating Texts, a public series of talks on subtitling, translation and adaptation.
Kombola Ramadhani Mussa
The Long Table: An Open Discussion on Translating Identities
Kombola Ramadhani Mussa is Leverhulme Research Fellow at Cardiff University. She holds a PhD in Italian Studies from Reading University. Her broader research interests include postcolonial narratives, multiculturalism and multilingualism in literature.
Linde Luijnenburg
Film Screening: Africa is You – The Somali-Dutch Community in Birmingham and Q&A with Filmmaker Linde Luijnenburg
Macedonia Express: Colour, Sound, Vision, Texture, and Smell as Foundational Elements of Language
Dr. Linde Luijnenburg completed her PhD on Italian comedy film and postcolonial theory at the University of Warwick. She recently received a fellowship to conduct visual and linguistic research on what she coined “somalo-italianità” in Somali diasporic communities in England, which will be followed by an online documentary and interactive platform discussing the mechanisms of identity formations. She is the co-producer of documentaries and short films, including Africa is You (2016), and At Home (2012) and has published on Italian, Dutch and Somali literature and film and postcolonial theory.
Loredana Polezzi
Macedonia Express: Colour, Sound, Vision, Texture, and Smell as Foundational Elements of Language
A Conversation with Professionals: How Should We Support Language Volunteers?
Loredana Polezzi is Professor of Translation Studies in the School of Modern Languages at Cardiff University. Her main research interests are in the connection between translation, migration and other forms of travel. Her recent work focuses on how geographical and social mobilities are connected to the theories and practices of translation and self-translation. With Rita Wilson, she is co-editor of The Translator. She is currently a co-investigator in the research project ‘Transnationalizing Modern Languages’, funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council under its ‘Translating Cultures’ scheme, and she is also a founding member of the ‘Cultural Literacy in Europe’ network.
Lucy Garnier
The Long Table: An Open Discussion on Translating Identities
Lucy Garnier is a freelance academic translator who works between French and English, primarily in the social sciences and humanities. Her own research background is in French Literature and Women’s Studies and she now teaches and publishes in the field of Translation Studies.
Mark Mellor
(Un)translatability: an interview with Emily Apter and Mark Mellor
Mark Mellor studied European literature at Essex University, Philology at Madrid Complutense, and Philosophy at University College London. He is the Editor in chief at Cadenza Academic Translations, an Exeter-based company that specialises exclusively in the translation of academic books and articles in the arts, humanities and social sciences.
Martin Sorrell
Tongue Tied: Performance of Martin Sorrel’s Award-Winning Short Story, Performed by Performance Artist and Musician Kate Cameron (Followed by Discussion)
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. Two of his translations, one drama, and three stories have won awards. A.D 699 is one of them.
Matt Burden
El mundo sigue (Life Goes On): Q&A with the Subtitlers
Matt Burden is a recent graduate of the University of Exeter’s MA in Translation Studies. He is currently Junior Editor at Cadenza Academic Translations, a company that specialises in the translation of academic texts in the arts, humanities and social sciences. Along with Rebecca Ellerker, he translated and subtitled the film El mundo sigue (1963) as part of the ‘Subtitling World Cinema’ Project.
Michelle Bolduc
Translation! Festival 2019: Languages in Motion organiser
Performance: La traductrice et la grenouille (The Translator and the Frog)
Professor Michelle Bolduc works with translation as a theory as well as a practice. In addition to analysing the relationship between rhetoric and translation, she translates works of both French poetry (primarily Breton poets, and especially the poetry of Anne Jullien) and philosophy (the work of Belgian philosopher Chaïm Perelman). American by birth, French by love, and (proceeding toward) British by design, she currently directs the MA in Translation Studies at the University of Exeter.
Nazand Begikhani
Constructing the Self Through Writing Across Languages: An Interview with Award Winning Kurdish Writer Nazand Begikhani
Dr. Nazand Begikhani, Senior Research Fellow at the University of Bristol, is a Kurdish poet of international renown with eight poetry collections in Kurdish, French and English. She is a polyglot, translated T. S. Elliot and Baudelaire into Kurdish. In 2012, she was awarded the French Simone Landrey’s Feminine Poetry Prize for her poetry collection, Le lendemain d’hier. Her poem, An Ordinary Day, from Bells of Speech (Ambit, 2006), is featured in The Forward Book of Poetry 2008, as one of the best poems of the year from the Forward Poetry Prizes.
Piotr Wegorowski
The Long Table: An Open Discussion on Translating Identities
Piotr Wegorowski is a lecturer in applied linguistics at the University of Glasgow, having recently completed his doctoral studies at Cardiff University. His research interests include lay-professional communication and translanguaging.
Rebecca Ellerker
Film Screening: El mundo sigue (Life Goes On), Followed by Q&A with the Subtitlers
Rebecca Ellerker is a former Head of Languages at a secondary school in Plymouth. In 2017 she embarked on an MA in Translation Studies at the University of Exeter, during which she was involved in subtitling El Mundo Sigue as part of the University’s Subtitling World Cinema Project. After successfully graduating in 2018, Rebecca has set up her own translation business. Whilst still working in education, she is also a Freelance Translator, specialising in French and Spanish to English translation.
Rosalind Harvey
No Borders Please, We’re Translators! A Creative Translation Workshop Featuring a Specially Commissioned Poem by Mexican-Scottish Poet Juana Adcock
Rosalind Harvey is an award-winning literary translator and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She is a founding member and chair of the Emerging Translators Network, an online community for early-career literary translators, and speaks regularly on the topic of getting into the profession and surviving. In 2016 she was an Arts Foundation Fellow and has been a judge for the Translators Association First Translation Prize, a lecturer in translation at the University of Warwick, and a tutor at the Warwick Translates Summer School.
Sally Faulkner
Film Screening: El mundo sigue (Life Goes On), Followed by Q&A with the Subtitlers
Sally Faulkner is Professor of Hispanic Studies and Film Studies at the University of Exeter. She researches and teaches Spanish- and Portuguese-language film, and is the author several books on world cinema, including A History of Spanish Film: Cinema and Society 1910-2010 (Bloomsbury Academic 2013; Spanish translation Iberoamericana-Vervuert 2017). She co-curated the VIVA! Spanish and Latin American Film Festival in Exeter earlier this year, and co-directs the University's Subtitling World Cinema Project.
Sandra Daroczi
Women Beyond Words: Translating Women's Experiences Across Media (workshop)
Sandra is a Teaching Fellow in French Studies at the University of Bath. She carried out her doctoral research at the University of Exeter, looking at the place of the reader in fictional works by contemporary French women writers. She is enthusiastic about public engagement, having co-organised a scavenger hunt in the Holburne Museum (Bath) and having encouraged participants to create their own museum of women on International Women’s Day.
Shirin Ramzanali Fazel
Macedonia Express: Colour, Sound, Vision, Texture, and Smell as Foundational Elements of Language
Shirin Ramzanali Fazel is an Italian writer of Somali and Pakistani origin, one of the pioneers of the movement known as Italian Migration Literature (letteratura italiana della migrazione) whose writings have been studied both in Italy and abroad. She was born in Mogadishu at the time of prosperity, tolerance and peaceful living amongst nations, including Somalis, Arabs, Sikhs and Chinese. In 1971 with her husband and young child Shirin, she had to leave her country for Novara, Italy, joining the first wave of Somali refugees. Over the years, Shirin moved across different continents but always kept her home in Italy. She currently lives in Birmingham, UK.
Sue Errington
Game Time: French, Mali and the Sundiata Creation Story (Devon Development Education Project)
Sue Errington is the co-ordinator of Devon Development Education, an education charity whose over-riding aim is to make the world a better place for all, through active global citizenship. In 2010 they produced a resource called ‘Take Mali’, looking at Mali, in West Africa, a former French colony, to develop intercultural understanding through the French language, geography of Mali and global citizenship.
Tony Eccles
Translating Clothing
Tony Eccles has a degree in archaeology (UCL, 1993) and spent some years as an assistant archaeologist on various excavations around the UK. After a period of volunteering at museums in Chester and Liverpool he found employment in 1998 as an assistant curator in the ethnology department at the World Museum, Liverpool. It was there that he also completed a national diploma in heritage management (NML, 2003). Standard curatorial work gave way to major redevelopment work and he participated in the development of the new World Cultures gallery, which opened to the public in May 2005. An opportunity then presented itself for Tony in that same year to become the curator of ethnography at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum.
Valentina Todino
Film Screening: Devon in Translation- Stories of Migration to Devon (Followed by Discussion with Filmmakers)
Live Translation: The Spectacular Translation Machine (With Graphic Novels Les Culotées and La Rivoluzione dei gelsomini)
Valentina is Italian and has lived in Devon for 15 years. She is an Italian teacher in Adult Education and has an MA in Applied Translation. She is also the founder of the Italian Cultural Association Exeter. She is interested in researching how Italian migration in Devon has developed in the last 100 years and is currently collaborating with the Italian Department at the University of Exeter, collecting video interviews of different generations of Italians that have lived in and around Exeter.
Valeria Brancaforte
Confabulations and Other Wordscapes: An Interview with an International Award-Winning Visual Artist Valeria Brancaforte
Self-taught as an artist, Valentina has a degree in Slavic languages and literatures from the Università di Milano, Italy. She soon approached the technique of relief print, an ideal medium to combine my passion towards both the images and the graphic representation of the word. She has always been fascinated by the text because of its semantic value and expressive potential: she does consider each letter a visual unit endowed with its own strength, which becomes, along with the illustrations that accompanies, an inseparable graphic whole. If in her projects she initially conceived the text as a narrative vehicle, in recent years she has often complemented her editions with a parallel series of prints, in which the word looses its primary function as a signifier, until - almost illegible - it becomes an image itself.
Yuval Evri
Speaking on Tongues: Multilingualism in Monolingual Contexts
Yuval Evri is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Kings College London. His research focuses on the cultural and political history of Palestine at the turn of the 20th century. His research explores the role of multilingualism and translation in nationalistic and monolingual contexts. It traces Arab-Jewish intellectual movement, exploring its unique multilingual translational and cultural model in relation to issues of language, territory and national identities.
Dr. Evri was a EUME postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Berlin (2013-2014) and a post-doctoral fellow at SOAS – University of London (2016-2018) and Fellow at the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at University of Pennsylvania (2018).