Translation and Memory: Constructing Publics, Pasts, and Cultures

Youngmin Kim is visiting professor at the Center for Intermedial and Multimodal Studies/Department of Film and Literature at Linnaeus University, Sweden; Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus and Director of Digital Humanities Lab, Dongguk University; Chair Professor, Hangzhou Normal University. He is currently Chair of ICLA Translation Committee and Co-Chair of ICLA Digital Comparative Literature Committee. His current book project, “Machine Translation, Database and Digital Comparative Literature,” explores the convergence of translation, comparative world literature, and digital humanities.

Tatjana Soldat-Jaffe is an Associate Professor at Florida State University. Her research focus centers on language and identity, the politics of language, minority languages, and translation studies. She co-edited Translation and the Global Humanities (2016) and Time, Space, Matter in Translation (2023). She is currently working on her project "Translation as a Social Practice: Refugee Writing in Social Media."

Erica Kath is a post-graduate student at UiT The Arctic University of Norway, completing her MA in English Literature. Her main research interests include modernism(s), Virginia Woolf, and the intersections of phenomenology and literature.

Anneleen Spiessens is an Associate Professor at Ghent University and affiliated with the Department of Translation, Interpreting and Communication where she teaches translation theory and practice. Focused on ethical, political and mnemonic aspects of translation, her research resulted in publications on testimonial literature, news translation, and museums. She is co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Memory (2022).

Paulo Lemos Horta (NYUAD) is the author of Marvellous Thieves: Secret Authors of the Arabian Nights (Harvard); Aladdin and The Annotated Arabian Nights, with Yasmine Seale (Norton); Cosmopolitanisms, with Bruce Robbins (NYU), and editor of Approaches to Teaching the 1001 Nights (MLA Press). This paper comes from research for his forthcoming monograph, under contract with Harvard UP, is entitled Rotten Little Worlds: World Literature in an age of Nationalism.

Jenny Marie Forsythe is an Assistant Professor of English at Western Washington University. Her research projects consider translation and historiography in early modern Atlantic world. Her recent work on Inca Garcilaso's translation history was published in Early American Literature in 2025. 

Dr. Hajer Ben Hadj Salem is an Assistant Professor at the Higher Institute of Humanities of Tunis and currently teaches at Sultan Qaboos University, as part of an international cooperation program. She holds a Ph.D. in American Studies (2010).   Her most recent publications include critical analyses of democracy-promotion discourse, gender and sociopolitical change in Tunisia, and the reframing of “moderate Islamism” in translation studies.

Marlene Hansen Esplin is an Associate Professor of Humanities at Brigham Young University. Her research interests include translation studies, U.S. and Latin American literatures, and gender studies. Recent projects have appeared in The Routledge Handbook of Latin American Literary Translation and the Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Multiethnic Literature. In 2024, she published Translating Home in the Global South: Migration, Belonging, and Language Justice, together with Isabel C. Gómez. 

Xinyi Zhao holds an MA in Comparative Literature from UCL and currently works as a literary editor at a publishing house. Her focus spans cultural studies and utopian thought. Her professional practice, which involves reviewing manuscripts—including an English-to-Chinese translation of a literary novel she is currently overseeing—fuels her sustained inquiry into the travel of ideas and aesthetic trans-coding across languages. 

Laura Woolley-Núñez (she/her) is an AHRC-funded PhD candidate in Translation and Transcultural Studies and a Graduate Teaching Assistant at the University of Warwick. Her practice-based thesis focuses on the use of feminist translation approaches and context-specific strategies in her ongoing translation of Memoria de la melancolía by María Teresa León. She is supervised by Dr Olga Castro and Professor Maureen Freely.

Debasmita Sarkar is an Assistant Professor of English at Shri Ramasamy Memorial University Sikkim, India and a doctoral researcher in Comparative Literature at Jadavpur University. Working across Bangla, Hindi, Nepali, English, and Spanish, she explores visual culture and mythic memory. She has published two books of translation-based poetry and experimental writing — Candrabidyuṯ-ē Lēkhā and Maggots of Misspellings. 

Jane Tylus is Andrew Downey Orrick Professor of Italian and Professor of Comparative Literature and Divinity at Yale. Her book Who Owns Literature?: Early Modernity’s Orphan Texts recently appeared with Cambridge. Her latest translation is Dacia Maraini’s Chiara di Assisi: Elogio della disobbedienza (Rutgers, 2023) and she has translated the complete poems of Gaspara Stampa and Lucrezia Tornabuoni de’Medici. She is currently writing "From Dante to Ferrante: Friendship in and among the Arts." 

Chiara Visentin is a PhD candidate in the Medieval Studies Program at Cornell University. She is broadly interested in the socio-political contexts and implications of medieval translation and appropriation of biblical materials across languages, forms and media. Her dissertation explores how the earliest surviving French biblical translations and adaptations from the twelfth century offer a window into previously overlooked aspects of noble self-fashioning.

N.P.Saparkhojayeva is a PhD-Candidate specializing in Translation Studies, Comparative Literature, and Mythopoetics. My academic interests include translation theory and practice, intercultural communication, and the reception of American Literature in post-Soviet contexts. I have published articles on literary translation, cultural memory, and approaches to teaching academic writing through world literature in Kazakhstan and beyond.