This seminar explores translationality as a critical framework for understanding the dynamic interplay between history and literature. Moving beyond translation as a bounded linguistic act, we approach translationality as a broader cultural, epistemological, and historiographic process—one that shapes how texts, narratives, and knowledge systems travel across languages, temporalities, and media. We invite papers that examine how literary texts mediate historical experience, how historical narratives are themselves acts of translation, and how translation operates as a site of transformation, negotiation, and re-signification. The seminar seeks to bring together scholars working across periods, languages, and regions to rethink the mutual imbrication of literary form and historical consciousness through translational practices. In the spirit of comparative literature, we are particularly interested in approaches that foreground cross-cultural encounters, multilingual archives, and interdisciplinary methodologies, including digital humanities and archival-based research. We strongly recommend that contributors anchor their papers in a major historical event, such as a battle, war, diplomatic crisis, or international incident, through which transformations in epistemologies and knowledge traditions across interlingual, intercultural, interliterary, and interhistoriographic forms of mediation may be brought into focus.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:
•    Translation as historiography; history as translation 
•    Translationality and the rewriting of the past 
•    Literary representations of historical encounters and cross-cultural exchange 
•    Multilingualism, mediation, and the circulation of knowledge 
•    Colonial, postcolonial, and decolonial translational practices 
•    Archival translation and the politics of preservation and omission 
•    Historical fiction as translational practice 
•    Religious, philosophical, or scientific texts in translation 
•    Translationality and material textuality (print, manuscript, digital media) 
•    Comparative rhetoric and epistemic transfer across cultures 
•    Translation, memory, and cultural trauma 
•    Digital approaches to translation and historical corpora 
•    Babel and other paradigms of multilingualism and translational encounter