Literary Translation and its Institutions
Description
US literary studies has seen an increased interest in the actors and institutions that shape our literary markets and canons. Most recently, scholars like Richard Jean So (2020), Laura McGrath (2021), Dan Sinykin (2023), and Alexander Manshel (2024) have shown how specific publishers, literary agents, 20th-century conglomeration, and prize and school culture impact what gets published, circulated, and consecrated in the US marketplace. But translations, which famously make up only 3% of the US’s publishing output, don’t always travel through the same institutions. Translators, book fairs, literary NGOs, national cultural institutes, and international copyright law, for example, play a much larger role in the global circulation of literature in translation. Yet because of their restricted role in US publishing, these institutions often receive less attention in US literary studies than they do in tangential fields like world literature studies or translation studies.
This seminar takes a granular approach to translation publishing by mapping and historicizing the institutions that have impacted the field. Following the work of Sarah Brouillette (2019), who traces the influence of UNESCO’s literary programming, and Giséle Sapiro (2023), who investigates the role of the Nobel Prize in influencing translation trends, this seminar uses the scale of the institution to probe the values, politics, and capital that are exchanged when publishing literature-in-translation. How do institutions navigate the specific risks involved in publishing translations? What does attention to institutions help us to say about the translated texts themselves? And what scales and methods allow us to think both literature and literary institutions at once?
Possible types of submission include, but are not limited to:
- The tracing of the routes of specific works-in-translation through institutions
- Histories of translating institutions, including but not limited to literary magazines, small presses, conglomerate translation publishing, online and self-publishing, etc.
- Work that places US institutions into dialogue with translation institutions in other English-speaking countries (Canada, Ireland, UK, Australia, India, Nigeria, etc.)
- Computational approaches to institutional data
- Analyses of the marketing of translations (BookTok, BookTube, legacy media, etc.)
- Materialist accounts of the production, distribution, and financing of literature-in-translation
- Mappings of international publishing networks
Proposals are due October 2nd, 2025. We welcome submissions by graduate students and early career researchers.
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Derick Mattern is a recent PhD graduate in comparative literature from Washington University in St Louis. His translations of contemporary Turkish poetry have appeared widely, supported by the National Endowment for the Arts and the British Council. Last year, his translation of Yücel Kayıran's Efsus'a Yolculuk (Passage to Efsus) won the inaugural Mary Jo Bang Award for Poetry Translation. He is currently revising a monograph on the translators of Nâzım Hikmet.
Speaker Bio
EDUCATION
2026 (exp.) Ph.D. in German, New York University
Diss. Title: Posture’s Last Stand: The Metapolitics of the German New Right
Speaker Bio
Rebecca Hanssens-Reed has an MFA in Literary Translation from the University of Iowa and is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at Washington University in St. Louis. Her dissertation, "Reanimating Translation: Margaret Sayers Peden, The Myth of Understanding, and the Death of a Craft," examines the material conditions of translation in the US through the story of the fifty-year career of Margaret Sayers Peden. Her translations have won the O. Henry Prize and appeared widely in journals.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Sonia Broad is a PhD candidate and casual academic in the School of Languages and Cultures at the University of Queensland where she teaches in the Japanese stream of the Master of Arts in Translation and Interpreting program. Her doctoral thesis explores the dynamics of contemporary Australian literature translated into Japanese with a focus on agents and their motivations across the Japanese publishing space and cultural interactions between Australia and Japan.
Speaker Bio
Eiji Yasuhara is a Ph.D. student researching the intersections between Latin American and Japanese literatures at the University of Kent, UK. He wrote on Latin American Avant-garde in his co-authored books including Finisterre2: Migrations in Spanish and Latin American Culture and Literature (Waxmann Verlag, 2024) and 58 Chapters to Understand Latin American Literature (Akashi Shoten, 2024).
Speaker Bio
Marco Ramírez Rojas is an Associate Professor of Spanish City University of New York, Lehman College. His academic and research interest include: Latin American Cosmopolitanism and World Literature, representations of politically inflicted fears in literature and cinema, and contemporary coming-of-age novels. He is the author of León de Greiff. Cartografías Cosmopolitas: León de Greiff y la tradición literaria (Purdue, UP. 2023). He has published several edited volumes and scholarly articles.
Speaker Bio
Yvonne Lindqvist is Professor in Translation Studies at Stockholm University. Her recent publications in English are Northern Crossings. Translation, Circulation and the Literary Semi-Periphery. 2022, within the program Cosmopolitan and Vernacular Dynamics in World Literatures, the article Translation Bibliomigration. The case of French Caribbean Literature in Sweden 2019 and she was one of the editors of World Literatures: Exploring the Cosmopolitan-Vernacular Exchange 2018.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Tim Groenland is a Taighde Éireann/Research Ireland Pathway Fellow in the School of English, Drama and Film at University College Dublin, Ireland, where he is PI on the project “The Publishing Infrastructures of Contemporary Anglophone Literature.” His book The Art of Editing: Raymond Carver and David Foster Wallace was published in 2019 by Bloomsbury Academic. He recently co-edited a special issue of Post45 with Evan Brier on “Editing American Literature” (2024).
Speaker Bio
Matthew Eatough is Associate Professor of English and Affiliate Faculty of Black and Latino Studies at Baruch College, City University of New York. He is the co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms, and has published widely on African literature, the twentieth and twenty-first century novel, and the history of modernism. His current projects include a study of corporate ideology in the contemporary African novel and a history of translated fiction in Anglo-American small presses.
Speaker Bio
Anna Muenchrath is an Assistant Professor of literature at the Florida Institute of Technology. She is the author of Making World Literature (UMass Press, 2024) and Selling Books with Algorithms (Cambridge UP, 2024). Her current project on how algorithms influence the US literary translation marketplace is being supported by an ACLS fellowship.
Speaker Bio
Rebekah Smith is a writer, editor, and translator, with a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from New York University. Her translation of Susana Thénon’s Ova Completa (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2021) was a finalist for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, and she was a 2024 NEA Translation fellow. She edits books with Ugly Duckling Presse and is one of the series editors of the presse’s Lost Lit series and the Señal Series for Latin American poetry in translation.