Centre for Translation Studies

The International Symposium "Decolonising Knowledge in the Humanities", will take place from 12-16 December 2023 in Accra and focus on minor forms in African cultures of knowledge, literature, and the arts as significant means of decolonising knowledge. Scholars will explore the relational complexities, challenges, and implications associated with minor forms, particularly in the context of African and African-diasporic cultures. The symposium aims to contribute to the ongoing discourse on decolonizing academia by engaging with alternative spaces of knowledge production and preservation.

More information here.

Eva Ulrike Pirker transitioned to VUB Brussels as Professor of English and Comparative Literature as of 1 October 2023. Her successor as the CTS's programme coordinator is Hannah Pardey who teaches in the Department of Anglophone Literatures / Literary Translation. More information on her research interests and publications are available on her website.

Heike Reissig is DUF guest lecturer for the winter term 2023/24. She teaches a seminar on artificial intelligence and literary translation entitled “Künstliche Intelligenz und Literaturübersetzen”.

She is a translator for English and French. Having worked as a product manager in the music industry for six years, she started work as a self-employed translator specialized in marketing in the year 2000. Since 2011 she translates English novels and non-fiction by writers such as Mary Beth Keane, Lauren Weisberger, Maria Popova, and Dizz Tate.  

This international and interdisciplinary symposium explored the interdependency of repositories of memory (archives) and their translation. We assume that the relationship between acts of translation and the construction of archives is multi-​​directional, and that translation and the archive are mutually constitutive: Not only do archives require translation but acts of translation definitively also require archives in turn.

Read conference report here

Visit conference website here

We congratulate Hypolite Kembeu on the successful disputation of his dissertation on the topic: "Politisch korrekt übersetzen? Zum Einfluss von sozialhistorischen und -politischen Faktoren auf das Übersetzen von postkolonialen afrikanischen Literaturen ins Deutsche."
Read more in German

Professor Ranjan Ghosh will be Alexander von Humboldt-Guest Professor and CTS fellow during the winter term of 2023/24. Professor Ranjan Ghosh teaches in the Department of English, University of North Bengal. His many books include Thinking Literature across Continents (Duke University Press, 2016, with J Hillis Miller), Philosophy and Poetry: Continental Perspectives ed. (Columbia University Press, 2019), Plastic Tagore (Oxford University Press, forthcoming) and the trilogy that he is completing to establish the discipline of plastic humanities: The Plastic Turn (Cornell University Press, 2022), Plastic Figures (Cornell University Press, 2024, forthcoming) and Plastic Literature (forthcoming). To know more about him, see here. For more information on his upcoming guest lecture click here.