Faculty

PROJECT FACULTY

The institute’s directors are Brian James Baer and Françoise Massardier-Kenney. They will be primarily responsible for the theoretical readings and will discuss texts translated from Russian and French while visiting scholars involved in translation studies in different regions of the world will present additional case studies.

Brian James Baer

Professor of Russian and Translation
The University's Institute for Applied Linguistics

Brian James Baer is Professor of Russian and Translation Studies at Kent State University and a member of the university’s Institute for Applied Linguistics. He received an MA degree in Slavic Languages and Literatures from New York University and a PhD in Comparative Literature from Yale. He has trained translators at the undergraduate and graduate levels since 1996, and advised doctoral students in translation studies since 2007. His research interests include the theory and practice of translation and cross-cultural communication. He is founding editor of the journal Translation and Interpreting Studies (TIS), general editor of the Kent State Scholarly Monograph Series in Translation Studies, and has served on the editorial board of PMLA (2009-2012) and Slavic and East European Journal (2013-present).  He is author of the monograph Other Russias: Homosexuality and the Crisis of Post-Soviet Identity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), which was selected as a Choice Outstanding Academic Title by the American Library Association in 2011. His most recent publications include the edited volumes Contexts, Subtexts, Pretexts: Literary Translation in Eastern Europe and Russia (Benjamins, 2011), No Good without Reward: The Selected Writings of Liubov Krichevskaya (University of Toronto, 2011), Russian Writers on Translation. An Anthology (St. Jerome, 2013), and The Unpredictable Workings of Culture (University of Tallinn, 2013), a translation of Juri Lotman’s final book-length work. He is co-editor with Claudia Angelelli of Research Methods in Translation and Interpreting Studies, forthcoming from Routledge, and is currently completing a book-length project entitled Reading between: Translation and the Making of Modern Russian Literature.

Françoise Massardier-Kenney

Director of the Institute for Applied Linguistics
The Institute for Applied Linguistics

Françoise Massardier-Kenney is Professor of French and Translation Studies at Kent State University and Director of the Institute for Applied Linguistics, an internationally known research and training translation center. She has trained translators at the graduate level since 1989 and advised Ph.D. students in Translation Studies since 2007.  Her research interests include the theory and practice of literary translation, and cross-cultural communication.She is the general editor of the American Translators Association (ATA) Scholarly Series.  Her publications include the monograph Gender in the Fiction of George Sand (2001) Translating Slavery: Gender and Race in French Women’s Writing (with Doris Kadish 2000, 2010) Translating Slavery: Ourika and its Progeny (2010), translations of Madame de Duras’s Ourika (2000) George Sand’s novel Valvèdre (2007) and Antoine Berman’s Toward a Translation Criticism (2009) as well as numerous articles on Sand, nineteenth-century women’s writers, and translation.  She is also the co-editor with Carol Maier of Literature in Translation (2010). Her forthcoming publications include chapters and articles on the translations of George Sand into English, the pedagogy of translation, and retranslation. She is currently working on issues in translation and cross-cultural competency.


VISITING SCHOLARS

Visiting Scholars include several prominent translation scholars and translators who will facilitate case studies discussions and guide participants in their own research and translation work.

Rosemary Arrojo

Professor
Comparative Literature at Binghamton University

Rosemary Arrojo is Professor of Comparative Literature at Binghamton University, where she directed the Translation Research and Instruction Program from 2003 to 2007 and helped implement the first Ph.D. in Translation Studies in the United States. Before that she taught translation studies in Brazil for almost twenty years. Her work has focused on the interface between translation studies and contemporary thought (deconstruction, psychoanalysis, and postcolonial and gender studies). She has published extensively on the topic both in Portuguese and in English. Samples of her work have also been translated in German, Spanish, Turkish, and Hungarian.

Peter Bush

Literary Translation Scholar and Translator

Peter Bush is a freelance literary translator and scholar who lives in Oxford. He has translated fifteen works from Catalan by authors such as Empar Moliner, Najat El Hachmi, Quim Monzó, Josep Pla, Mercè Rodoreda, Joan Sales, and Teresa Solana. His translation of Pla´s The Gray Notebook won the 2014 Ramon Llull Literary Translation Prize and he was awarded the Creu de Sant Jordi in 2015 for his translation and promotion of Catalan literature. He has also won awards for his translations from Portuguese and Spanish. He has translated work by  Juan Goytisolo, Juan Carlos Onetti, Leonardo Padura and Senel Paz and a number of classics including Celestina and Tyrant Banderas. His most recent translation from Catalan is Emili Teixidor's Black Bread, French, Alain Badiou's In Praise of Love and from Spanish, Carmen Boullosa's Before. He co-edited Literary Translation in Higher Education with Kirsten Malmkjaer and The Translator as Writer with Susan Bassnett.  A former Director of the BCLT he founded the journal In Other Words and the BCLT Literary Translation Summer School and was Professor of Literary Translation both at Middlesex University and the University of East Anglia.

M.R. Ghanoonparvar

Professor Emeritus of Persian and Comparative Literature
Persian and Comparative Literature at The University of Texas at Austin

M.R. Ghanoonparvar is Professor Emeritus of Persian and Comparative Literature at The University of Texas at Austin.  Ghanoonparvar has also taught at the University of Isfahan, the University of Virginia, and the University of Arizona and was a Rockefeller Fellow at the University of Michigan.  He has published widely on Persian literature and culture and on translation theory and practice in both English and Persian and is the author of Prophets of Doom: Literature as a Socio-Political Phenomenon in Modern Iran (1984), In a Persian Mirror: Images of the West and Westerners in Iranian Fiction (1993), Translating the Garden (2001), Reading Chubak (2005), and Persian Cuisine: Traditional, Regional and Modern Foods (2006).  His translations include Jalal Al-e Ahmad’s By the Pen, Sadeq Chubak's The Patient Stone, Simin Daneshvar's Savushun, Ahmad Kasravi's On Islam and Shi'ism, Sadeq Hedayat's The Myth of Creation, Davud Ghaffarzadegan's Fortune Told in Blood, Mohammad Reza Bayrami's The Tales of Sabalan, and Bahram Beyza'i's Memoirs of the Actor in a Supporting Role.  His edited volumes include Iranian Drama: An Anthology, In Transition:  Essays on Culture and Identity in Middle Eastern Societies, Gholamhoseyn Sa’edi's Othello in Wonderland and Mirror-Polishing Storytellers, and Moniru Ravanipur's Satan's Stones and Kanizu.  His most recent books and translations include The Neighbor Says: Letters of Nima Yushij on Modern Persian Prosody, Ja'far Modarres-Sadeqi'’s The Horse's Head (2011), and Red Olive: The Memoirs of Nahid Yusefian.  He is working on two forthcoming books, Iranian Films and Persian Fiction and Literary Diseases in Persian Literature.  He is the recipient of the 2008 American Institute for Iranian Studies Lois Roth Persian Translation Prize for Translating the Garden and 2009 Encyclopaedia Iranica Lifetime Achievement Award for Contributions to Iranian Culinary Arts.

Carol Maier

Professor Emerita of Spanish and Translation Studies
Spanish and Translation Studies at Kent State University

Carol Maier is Professor Emerita of Spanish and Translation Studies at Kent State University, where she is affiliated with the Institute for Applied Linguistics. Her research interests include translation criticism, theory, practice, and pedagogy. She has translated work by Nuria Amat, Octavio Armand, Rosa Chacel, Nivaria Tejera, Severo Sarduy, and María Zambrano, among others. In addition, she has edited or co-edited two special issues and several collections of essays, including Between Language and Cultures: Translation and Cross-Cultural Texts, with Anuradha Dingwaney, and Literature and Translation: Teaching Issues and Reading Practices, with Françoise Massardier-Kenney. Currently, she is editing a volume in honor of the late Helen Lane, a translation of Armand’s Clinamen, and new work by and about Chacel. Her translation of Chacel’s Confession is forthcoming from SUNY Press in Two Confessions, which also includes María Zambrano’s Confession, translated by Noël Valis. Her translations have received awards from the MLA, ALTA, and the Eugene M. Kayden Endowment, and she has received grants from the NEA (twice) and the NEH. She serves as the book review editor for TIS: Translation and Interpreting Studies and is a member of the advisory board of The Translator, TTR, and the book series Literatures, Cultures, Translation (Bloomsbury); she has also served as a member of ALTA’s board of directors.

Christi Merrill

 Professor of South Asian Literature
The Department of Comparative Literature at The University of Michigan

IChristi 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. She was head of the planning committee for the Department of Comparative Literature’s Year of Translation 2009-2010, and co-director of the LSA Theme Semester on Translation for Fall 2012 at University of Michigan.

Michelle Yeh

Professor of Chinese Literature
Chinese Literature at the University of California

Michelle Yeh is Distinguished Professor of Chinese literature and Chair of the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Davis. Her research interests include traditional and modern Chinese poetry, comparative poetics, international modernism and translation. Her major publications include: Modern Chinese Poetry: Theory and Practice since 1917, Essays on Modern Chinese Poetry, From the Margin: An Alternative Tradition of Modern Chinese Poetry, Essays on Modern Poetry from Taiwan (monographs); Anthology of Modern Chinese Poetry, No Trace of the Gardener: Poems of Yang Mu, A Lifetime Is a Promise to Keep: Poems of Huang Xiang (English translations); Frontier Taiwan: An Anthology of Modern Chinese Poetry, Sailing to Formosa: A Poetic Companion to Taiwan (credited anthologies in English); and Iconography of the Sea: Poems of Derek Walcott (Chinese translation); and two collections of essays on poetry and aromatics.