About

Caroline Summers is an Associate Professor of Translation and Transcultural Studies and is Director of Undergraduate Recruitment for the School of Modern Languages and Cultures. She is also responsible for Postgraduate Research Admissions in Translation and Transcultural Studies. Prior to joining Warwick in 2022, she worked at the University of Leeds (2012-2022) as a Teaching Fellow and then Lecturer in German and Comparative Literary Translation.

Caroline has experience as a freelance translator and is on the judging panel for the John Dryden Translation Competition.

Twitter: @DrCaroSummers

Research interests

• Social and literary narratives
• Authorship and translation
• Contemporary German literature
• Feminism and women’s writing
• Comparative literary approaches

Caroline’s current research explores translation in the literature of German Reunification (1989/90) and its aftermath. The project focuses on how the fictional and autofictional narratives of the literary text create a space in which social narratives of experience and identity take on new significance: it combines literary and social theories of narrative with Walter Benjamin’s concept of ‘afterlife’, to theorise how cultural identity and memory are prolonged and recreated in (translated) literature. There are two main areas of focus: firstly, exploring literary narrative as a ‘translation’ of experience; and secondly, examining the possibility that literary translation might enable social narratives to endure even after a ‘source culture’ has ceased to exist.

Research supervision

Caroline welcomes proposals from prospective research students whose projects relate to the research interests listed above. Information on eligibility requirements is available here.

Caroline is currently supervising several PhD students across a range of literary and non-literary projects in translation from Chinese, German, Russian and Catalan.

PhD students successfully supervised to completion:

Peter Freeth (2022) Look who's back in the frame: The translator's visibility in the digital paratextual framings of translated literary texts

James Garza (2021) The relationship between textual and reader variables in literary perception: An empirical approach to the reception of Japanese poetry in translation

Publications

Monograph

Examining Text and Authorship in Translation: What Remains of Christa Wolf?, London: Palgrave MacMillan (2017).

Articles and chapters

‘Narrative Theory’, in Federico Zanettin and Chris Rundle (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Translation Methodology, London: Routledge (2022).

‘Authorship’, in Mona Baker and Gabriela Saldanha (eds) The Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, Third Edition, London: Routledge (2021).

‘Translating Subjective Authenticity from Christa T. to Stadt der Engel and August: Re-presenting Christa Wolf’s Subaltern Voice’, in Sonja Klocke and Jennifer Hosek (eds), Christa Wolf: A Companion, Berlin: de Gruyter (2018), pp. 219-41.

‘Hostage to Feminism? The Success of Christa Wolf's Kassandra in its 1984 English Translation’, Gender & History 30 (2018): 226-39.

The Playwright as Epic Translator? Mother Courage and the Intertextual Construction of an ‘English Brecht’, German Life and Letters 69 (2016): 233-55.

‘World Authorship as a Struggle for Consecration: Christa Wolf and Der geteilte Himmel in the English-speaking world’, Seminar 51 (2015): 148-72.

‘Patterns of Authorship: The Translation of Christa Wolf’s Kindheitsmuster’, German Life and Letters 67 (2014): 378-98.

What Remains: The Institutional Reframing of Authorship in Translated Peritexts’, in Valerie Pellatt (ed.), Text, Extratext, Metatext and Paratext in Translation, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press (2013), pp. 9-32.

‘Translating the Author-Function: The (Re)Narration of Christa Wolf’, New Voices in Translation Studies 8 (2012): 128-45.

Book reviews

‘Christian Felix Weiße the Translator: Cultural Transfer and Literary Entrepreneurship in the Enlightenment. By Tom Zille. London: IMLR Research. 2021. xiii + 221 pp. £25. ISBN 978-0-85457-273-1’, Modern Language Review 117 (2022).

‘Sonja E. Klocke. Inscription and Rebellion: Illness and the Symptomatic Body in East German Literature. Rochester NY: Camden House, 2015. 258pp. ISBN: 9781571139337’, Germanic Review 91 (2016): 438-40.

Published translations

On a Knife Edge: How Germany Lost the First World War, co-translation with Anne Buckley of Holger Afflerbach, Auf Messers Schneide: Wie das deutsche Reich den Ersten Weltkrieg verlor (forthcoming, Cambridge University Press)

‘Dear Darling’, translation of Lydia Mischkulnig, ‘Herzilein’ (No Man’s Land translation journal, 2021)

Qualifications

Qualifications

Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy (2014)

PhD in Translation Studies, University of Manchester (2013)

MA in Translation and Interpreting Studies, University of Manchester (2009)

BA (Hons) in Modern and Medieval Languages (French and German), University of Cambridge (2004)