Global Citizenship in an Age of Born-Translated Literature

The London Intercollegiate Network for Comparative Studies (LINKS), the UCL Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS), and Queen Mary University of London are proud to host Prof. Rebecca L. Walkowitz (Rutgers) in conversation with researchers in Comparative Literature. 

15.00 Masterclass with Rebecca L. Walkowitz 

• This masterclass gives postgraduate and doctoral students the opportunity to discuss with Prof. Walkowitz a selection of her recent writings. Participants are encouraged to join the masterclass having read the following texts:
• 1. “This Is Not Your Language” (from Born Translated) Please find this text here.
• 2. “Reading in a World of Wonderlands” (Los Angeles Review of Books) https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/reading-world-wonderlands/
• 3. “Future Reading” (ACLA State of the Discipline) https://stateofthediscipline.acla.org/entry/future-reading

17.30 Roundtable: Thoughts on Born Translated

• This roundtable discussion celebrates Prof. Walkowitz’s contribution to comparative studies, with specific focus on her award-winning monograph: Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature (2015). All are welcome.
• Discussants: Florian Mussgnug (UCL), Tamar Steinitz (Goldsmiths), Francesca Orsini (SOAS), Galin Tihanov (Queen Mary University London) 
• Respondent: Rebecca L. Walkowitz (Rutgers)
• Chair: Adhira Mangalagiri (Queen Mary University London)

19.00 Drinks reception

Bio

Rebecca L. Walkowitz is Professor and Chair in the English Department and Affiliate Faculty in Comparative Literature at Rutgers University. She is the author of Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation (2006) and Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature (2015), which received an Honorable Mention for the first annual Matei Calinescu Prize from the MLA and has been translated or is forthcoming in Danish, Polish, Hungarian, and Japanese. She is also the editor or coeditor of 8 books, including A New Vocabulary for Global Modernism(2016). Professor Walkowitz is coeditor and co-founder of the book series “Literature Now” and has served on the executive committees of the American Comparative Literature Association, the Society for Novel Studies, and the Modernist Studies Association, for which she served as President in 2014-15. She has served as Wolfgang Iser Lecturer at the University of Konstanz, Visiting Hurst Professor at Washington University in St. Louis, and she will return as a faculty member for the Institute for World Literature in July 2019. Her current book project, “Future Reading,” focuses on the concept of the anglophone and the representation of world languages in contemporary writing.

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Adhira Mangalagiri is Lecturer in Comparative Literature at Queen Mary University London. Her areas of expertise linclude modern Chinese literature (early- and mid-twentieth centuries) and Hindi and Urdu literatures. Her research explores intersections between the Chinese and Indian literary spheres during the modern period. She is also interested in questions of critical theory, postcolonial theory, and in literary comparison beyond Euro-centric paradigms and in relation to the China-India literary axis.

Florian Mussgnug is Reader in Italian and Comparative Literature at University College London, and founding director of the UCL Comparative Literature Programme. He is especially interested in 20th and 21st Century literature, with a focus on literary theory, experimental literature and narrative prose fiction. His The Eloquence of Ghosts: Giorgio Manganelli and the Afterlife of the Avant-Garde(2010) was awarded the Edinburgh Gadda Prize in 2012. He is co-investigator for the five-year AHRC-funded research project "Interdisciplinary Italy 1900- 2020: Interart/Intermedia” and academic director of the UCL Cities partnerships Programme in Rome.

Francesca Orsini is Professor of Hindi and South Asian Literature at SOAS, University of London. She is currently finishing a book on the multilingual literary history of Awadh from the 15c to the early-20c as "multilingual local" in world literature, and leading a project funded by the European Research Council (2015-2020) on “Multilingual locals and significant geographies: for a new approach to world literature”, which proposes an alternative, located and multilingual approach to world literature from the perspective of three regions: North India, the Maghreb, and the Horn of Africa.

Tamar Steinitz is Lecturer in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Goldsmiths, University of London, and has worked as a literary translator between English and Hebrew. Her research explores modern and contemporary transnational literature, with a focus on translingualism and translation. She is the author of Translingual Identities: Language and the Self in Stefan Heym and Jakov Lind(Camden House, 2013) and co-editor of Multilingual Currents in Literature, Translation and Culture (Routledge, 2018)

Galin Tihanov is the George Steiner Professor of Comparative Literature at Queen Mary University of London. He has held visiting appointments at Yale University, St. Gallen University, the University of Sao Paulo, Peking University, Seoul National University, and the Higher School of Economics (Moscow). He has published widely on German, Russian, and East-European cultural and intellectual history; his current research is on world literature, cosmopolitanism, and exile. His most recent book is The Birth and Death of Literary Theory: Regimes of Relevance in Russia and Beyond (Stanford University Press, 2019); he is currently writing Cosmopolitanism: A Very Short Introduction for Oxford University Press.