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.