Prof. Susan Bassnett

Susan Bassnett is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Warwick and has just been appointed Special Adviser in Translation Studies for a 3 year period attached to the School of Modern Languages and Cultures. She was educated in Denmark, Portugal and Italy, acquiring various languages in childhood. She established postgraduate programmes in Comparative Literature and then in Translation Studies at the University of Warwick where she also served twice as Pro-Vice-Chancellor. She continues to lecture and run workshops around the world and her current research is on translation and memory. She is an elected Fellow of the Institute of Linguists, elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Fellow of the Academia Europaea. In recent years she has acted as judge of a number of major literary prizes including the Times/Stephen Spender Poetry in Translation Prize, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the IMPAC Dublin prize. She is also known for her journalism, translations and poetry. She has authored more than twenty books, including Translation Studies (1980, 1991, 2002), Comparative Literature (1993), Constructing Cultures: Essays on Literary Translation, with André Lefevre (1996), Translation in Global News, with Esperanca Bielsa (2008), and Reflections on Translation (2011).

 

Prof. Jean Boase-Beier

Jean Boase-Beier studied English and Linguistics at the University of Regensburg, Germany, where she also lectured in Linguistics and German and led a research project funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinshaft (German Research Council) on Word Formation. She has taught Literary Translation, Linguistics, German and Stylistics at UEA since 1991 and set up UEA's MA in Literary Translation in 1993. An Executive Committee member of the British Comparative Literature Association, member of the Advisory Panel of the British Centre for Literary Translation, and former Executive Committee member of the Translators Association, she is also a translator between German and English and the editor of the Visible Poets series of bilingual poetry books (Arc Publications). She was promoted to Professor in 2008. She has recently held an Arts and Humanities Research Council Leadership Fellowship on ‘Translating the Poetry of the Holocaust’. Her recent book, Translating the Poetry of the Holocaust: Translation, Style and the Reader (Bloomsbury 2015) examines how the openness to engagement that Holocaust poetry can engender, achieved through stylistic means, needs to be preserved in translation if the translated poem is to function as a Holocaust poem in any meaningful sense.

 

Prof. Peter Davies

Peter Davies is Professor of Modern German Studies at the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures, University of Edinburgh. His research specialisms include Holocaust writing and translation, myth, modernity and literature, myths of matriarchy in German culture, and gender and the body. He is a co-founder and director of The Holocaust and Translation Research Network, founded in 2010 and supported by a Research Networking grant from the AHRC. The network arose from an understanding that the discussion of Holocaust writing – and in particular of testimonial texts by survivors – very rarely takes into account the fact that such texts are frequently read and discussed through translation. The network has brought together scholars of Holocaust writing, literature, autobiography, and translation, in order to discuss points of contact and conflict between these disciplines, to open up new areas of investigation, and to plan further work. Project partners are the Wiener Library, London, the Centre for German-Jewish Studies, Sussex University, the Center for Jewish Studies, University of Edinburgh, and the British Centre for Literary Translation, Norwich.