Directed by Preetha Mani and Jeffrey Lawrence
Translation has been central to the global history of cultural exchange, and translators pivotal to navigating social, political, and religious divides. While professionalization and advocacy movements have brought greater visibility to the field, recent scholarship has put pressure on the concept of translation, arguing that we should move beyond traditional understandings of the term as the simple rendering of one language into another. In this seminar, we plan to build on this exciting intellectual entry point by focusing on the role that translation has played across academic, artistic, and everyday spaces. How does translation function in each of these environments? How do different disciplinary engagements with translation relate to and inform one another? How do daily practices of translation shape literary, visual, and political culture?
Our approach to what counts as translation is chronologically and conceptually open—spanning ancient to modern periods as well as plurilingual sites and more contingent zones of linguistic fluidity (for example, spaces such as Rutgers itself, where 68% of undergraduates speak a language other than English at home, or geographically contingent regions such as diasporas or “the Americas”). We hope that deeper attention to practices of translation—including (but not limited to) translingualism, code-switching, AI-generated translation, literary translation, legal translation, ethnographic transcription, film subtitling, intermedial adaptation, religious exegesis, and even acts of political and cultural representation—will allow us to consider how seemingly monolingual spaces are often, at heart, constituted through translation. At the same time, we suggest that foregrounding processes of translation can radically revise the conventional view of translation as a straightforward transfer of meaning between two linguistically equivalent cultural systems.
Seminar Leaders
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Jeffrey Lawrence
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- Associate Professor of English
Jeffrey Lawrence’s areas of specialization are contemporary US and Latin American literature and culture, publishing, translation, and creative writing.
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Preetha Mani
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- Associate Professor of South Asian Literatures
I am a literary comparatist focusing on issues of translation, genre, feminist and postcolonial theory, and world literature. My specialization is in twentieth-century Hindi and Tamil literature and literary history with an emphasis on how these rich traditions converse with other literatures of India and the world.
Faculty Fellows
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Jeehyun Choi
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- Assistant Professor of English
Jeehyun Choi studies and teaches Asian American and diasporic literatures, with particular interest in transpacific cultural productions that engage the history of multiple imperialisms in Asia.
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Jae Won Chung
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- Assistant Professor of Asian Languages and Cultures
Jae Won Edward Chung has taught at Rutgers since 2019. He specializes in modern and contemporary Korean literature and visual culture, with a focus on theories of everyday life, embodiment, affect, intermediality, photography, and translation.
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Miguel Jiménez-Crespo
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- Professor of Spanish and Portuguese
Professor Jimenez's research focuses on translation technologies, localization, corpus-based translation studies, cognitive translation studies, translation theory, and the didactics of translation.
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Ryan Kernan
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- Associate Professor of English
My comparativist approach to the literary production of the African Diaspora builds on the work of scholars who have been developing the field of African American Studies and Diasporic Studies within modern academia since the late 1960s.
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Jill North
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- Professor of Philosophy
I work primarily in philosophy of physics. I also have interests in metaphysics, especially the metaphysics of physics, philosophy of science, and philosophy of mathematics. At the moment I am especially interested in issues surrounding the use of mathematics in physics, particularly given that there are different mathematical formulations available for any theory.
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Jeffrey Ulrich
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- Associate Professor of Classics
The Roman Novel, Augustan Poetry, The Reception of Greek Philosophy in Latin literature, Time and Nostalgia, and Ancient Sexuality
Graduate Fellows
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Mayrose C. Beatty
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- English
Mayrose C. Beatty is a PhD candidate in the Department of English. Her dissertation focuses on nineteenth century British sensation fiction, tracing its links to ancient Greek tragedy.
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Arpita Biswas
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- Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
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Daniela Mosquera Camacho
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- Geography
My work examines peasants' (campesinos and campesinas) property configurations in protected areas in northern Colombia –where I collaborate with Martha Forero, a social leader from Cesar– and solidarity networks among Central American rural farmworkers in the north of the U.S –where I collaborate with Mujeres Divinas NY–. I am also interested in extractivism and the energy transition in Colombia.
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Vero Chai
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- Comparative Literature
Vero Chai is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at Rutgers University and an editorial assistant of positions: asia critique. Her research concerns the intersection of film, literature, and the archive, with an emphasis on the Asian diasporas. Vero’s writings have appeared in Art Journal, Diacritics, positions politics, and Comparative Literature Studies. She co-organized the 2025 Rutgers Comp Lit graduate conference “Body in Excess.”
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Ankita Harbola
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- German
Ankita Harbola joined the department in Fall 2021 as an SGS Dean's Fellow. Her research focuses on (post)migration, exile, and the question of translation in contemporary German literature. Her dissertation "Philologies of Post-Flight" explores how experiences of flight influence one's understanding of linguistic mediation, as seen in the works of Senthuran Varatharajah, Karosh Taha, and Jehona Kicaj. Her essay, “What is Living in Lebendiges Archiv (2023)?,” is forthcoming in Articulations. In the coming academic year (2026-27), she will be a fellow at the Rutgers’ Center for Cultural Analysis, participating in a research seminar on “Translation.”
Postdoctoral Fellows
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Alia Ayman
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- Ph.D., Sociocultural Anthropology (New York University)
Alia Ayman is a cofounder of the Cairo-based Zawya Cinema and an independent film and moving image curator who has worked with Berlinale Forum, The International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA), BlackStar Film Festival, Flaherty NYC and Images Festival, among others.
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Maysam Taher
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- Ph.D., Middle Eastern Studies (New York University)
Maysam Taher lives, teaches, and writes in several places between Italy, Libya, and the United States. Her interests include borders and migration, deportation and confinement, fascism, post-colonialism, archival methodologies, and the question of historical recovery in relation to projects of reparations.