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.
2026/2027 SEMINAR LEADERS
Preetha Mani Jeffrey Lawrence Application Links
Postdoctoral Associate - apply here
CCA Faculty Fellowship - apply here
CCA Graduate Fellowship Application - apply here