Theorizing Translation in the Global South: Networks and Sites of World Literary Formations

A. Holly Shissler is Associate Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History in the Department of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Chicago. Her research focuses on nationalism, women and modernity, and the emergence of the Turkish nation-state in the post-World War I period.

Razieh Araghi is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Middle Eastern Studies at Arizona State University. She works on translation and gender studies in late 19th and early 20th century Iran and Turkey. 

Eszter Melitta Szabó is a PhD student at the University of Toronto in Near & Middle Eastern Civilizations. Her PhD research examines Iranian women’s political writings, especially poetry, published in periodicals before the 1979 Iranian Revolution, in the context of the decolonizing Third World. She is a Research Assistant for the Women Poets Iranica project and is currently preparing a manuscript for an English-Persian bilingual volume of Iranian women's revolutionary poetry.

Sampayan Chakraborty is currently doing his PhD as a UGC Junior Research Fellow at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology Mandi, India. His research explores world literature and the circulation and reception of texts, specifically in the context of Indo-Soviet literary transactions. He attended the Summer School Program of Institute for World Literature, Harvard University at the University of Cyprus in 2024 with full tuition fees waiver. 

Emek Ergun is Associate Professor of Global Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies at UNC Charlotte. Her first book, Virgin Crossing Borders: Feminist Resistance and Solidarity in Translation received MESA 2024 Fatema Mernissi Book Award. Ergun is also the co-editor of Feminist Translation Studies and Feminist Theory Reader. Ergun is also the feminist translator of the Turkish translations of Octavia Butler’s Kindred and Canadian trans writer of color Vivek Shraya’s I’m Afraid of Men.

Francesca Cricelli is a literary translator and researcher. She has translated Italian women writers for Brazilian publishers, including Elena Ferrante and Igiaba Scego, among others. She holds a PhD in Foreign Literatures and Translation from the University of São Paulo and was a visiting researcher at the University of London. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at USP, working on representations of motherhood in literature and translations of Italian novelist Elsa Morante.

Kamran Rastegar is professor of comparative literature in the Department of International Literary and Cultural Studies. His books include Literary Modernity between Europe and the Middle East (Routledge, 2007), and Surviving Images: Cinema, War and Cultural Memory in the Middle East (Oxford University Press, 2015). He is currently working on a critical study of the cinema of Elia Suleiman.

Jaideep Pandey is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He works on comparative literary modernities between Europe, the Middle East, and South Asia, with a focus on Urdu literature, questions of translating languages and vocabularies of desire and eroticism, and the role of religion in constituting modern selves in colonial worlds.

Samuel Hodgkin is an assistant professor of Comparative Literature at Yale University, and the author of Persianate Verse and the Poetics of Eastern Internationalism (Cambridge, 2023). He is a co-organizer of the “Cultures of World Socialism” working group, and his articles have appeared in Comparative Literature Studies, PMLA, Iranian Studies, Philological Encounters, and Cahiers d’Asie centrale.

Rebecca C. Johnson is associate professor of English and Middle East and North African Studies at Northwestern University. She is author of Stranger Fictions: A History of the Novel in Arabic Translation (2021), and serves as Associate Editor for the Journal of Arabic Literature. 

Mehtap Ozdemir is an assistant professor of comparative literature at Emory University. Her research engages several fields in a translingual compass:global modernities, translation theory, world literature, empire studies, and secularization.  She has published and forthcoming articles in Philological Encounters, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, Comparative Literature Studies, Middle Eastern Literatures, and The Cambridge History of Middle Eastern Modernism.

Supriya Kaur Dhaliwal is a writer and literary translator, currently based in Manchester, where she is working towards a practice-based PhD at MMU’s Centre for Place Writing. Her research explores reservoirs as engineered ecologies shaped by memories of displacement, control, transformation. She was selected for Poetry Ireland’s Introductions Series in 2018, and was the 2021 Charles Wallace India Trust Fellow at the University of Kent. Her book, The Yak Dilemma, is published by Makina Press.

Thomas Genova is an Associate Professor of Spanish, Latin American Studies, and African and Black American Studies at the University of Minnesota Morris. He is the author of Imperial Educación: Race and Republican Motherhood in the Nineteenth-Century Americas. 

Ibrahim Badshah is a PhD candidate in the Department of English, University of Houston, specializing in areas of critical translation theory, world literature and Postcolonialism. His dissertation explore the analytical category of "Resistance Translation," through case studies of literary translations within the Global South. Ibrahim is also a literary translator between Arabic, Malayalam, and English, and has translated works by Jokha Al-Harthi, and Saud Alsanousi.

Francesca Chubb-Confer is a visiting assistant professor of religion at Oberlin College.