The IAL is pleased to present the fifth lecture in the annual Gregory M. Shreve Lecture Series in Translation Studies, instituted in honor of the IAL’s founding director. The series is made possible through the generosity of alumni, IAL faculty members, and friends of the IAL. The lecture will take place on March 3, at 3: 30 in the Kent State Moulton Hall ballroom. Refreshments will be served and all are welcome.
Christi A Merrill is an associate professor of South Asian Literature and Postcolonial Theory at the University of Michigan, and author of Riddles of Belonging: India in Translation and other Tales of Possession (Fordham University Press, 2009). Her translations of the stories of Rajasthani writer Vijaydan Detha, Chouboli and Other Stories, were supported by a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, co-published by Katha (New Delhi) and Fordham University Press (New York), and won the 2012 A.K. Ramanujan Award for translation from the Association of Asian Studies. She spent the 2013-14 school year in India on a National Endowment for the Humanities/American Institute of Indian Studies Senior Fellowship researching her latest book project, Genres of Real Life: Mediating Stories of Injustice Across Languages. This scholarship is linked to her current project translating Kausalya Baisantry’s Dohara Abhishap [Doubly Cursed], a Dalit woman’s “life story” [jeevan ki katha] in Hindi that offers an eloquent protest against the discrimination Baisantry experienced because of her (untouchable) caste and gender. Merrill’s articles on translation, postcolonialism and the study of human rights have appeared most recently in Blackwell’s Companion to Translation Studies, Routledge Handbook of Translation Studies, boundary 2, Teaching Literary Texts in Translation, and World Literature Today. She has served on the Modern Language Association’s Translation Prize Selection Committee, and before that on the Executive Committee for the MLA’s Translation Discussion Group.