Cultural Translation
11th December 2009
Programme
School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies,
Race, Representation and Cultural Identity Research Group;
School of European Studies,
Representing Migration and Mobility in European Cultures Network
Cultural Translation: An Interdisciplinary Conference
Bute Building, Room 1.50, Cardiff University
10.00-11.15
11.15-11.30
11.30-13.00
13.00-14.00
14.00-15.00
15.00-15.10
15.10-16.10
16.10-16.20
16.20-17.20
17.20-17.20
17.30-18.30
Mieke Bal Keynote Presentation
15 min break
Sharif Gemie The Veil: A Bridge Between Cultures?
Rebecca Beirne Diasporic and Local Representations of SameSex Female Desires in Indian, Indian-Canadian,
Indian-Scottish and Indian-American cinema’
Floriana Bernardi Fatema Mernissi and cultural translation
1 hour lunch
Kinship in Walter Benjamin’s Task of the
Veronica O’Neil Translator
Ruth J. Owen Death by Cultural Translation
10 min break
Ariela Grosz-Rophe Intellectuals as Culture Transmitters
Caterina Sinibaldi Dangerous comic strips
10 min break
Fists of confusion: Bruce Lee and Monolingual
Paul Bowman Cultural Translation
David Huddart Emblems of cultural translation
10 min break
Sarah Maitland First do no harm: Power, agency and cultural
translation in the post-colonial context
Alexis Nuselovici, Glenn The moiré effect
Davidson, Wyn Mason
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Programme
Sharif Gemie
The Veil: A Bridge Between Cultures?
Rebecca Beirne
Diasporic and Local Representations of Same-
11.30-13.00
Sex Female Desires in Indian, Indian-Canadian,
Indian-Scottish and Indian-American cinema’
Floriana Bernardi
13.00-14.00
Fatema Mernissi and cultural translation
1 hour lunch
Sharif Gemie

The ‘Veil’: a Bridge Between Cultures?
Western interest and concern about Muslim veiling practices seems inexhaustible. In the
western media, the veil has become a common cliché: an instantly recognizable signifier for
themes such as exclusion, oppression, reactionary thinking and the separation of cultures. Such
points have a certain validity, but they are almost exclusively based on outsiders’ perspectives.
While accepting that compulsory veiling constitutes an unacceptable breach of human
rights, this paper will explore other dimensions of veiling in western and Muslim societies. It
will discuss the Muslim veil as fashion statement, as ‘passport’ between different worlds, and as
symbol of a new, globalized, trans-national Islam. Some specific examples will be drawn from
French experience, where the presence of veil-wearing women has become a contentious and
politicized issue, and from Iranian society, where the varieties and nuances of veil-wearing are
more complex than often supposed. The paper will conclude by suggesting a post-Orientalist
perspective on this issue.
Rebecca Beirne

Diasporic and Local Representations of Same-Sex Female Desires in Indian,
Indian-Canadian, Indian-Scottish and Indian-American cinema
This paper examines the similarities and differences in the depiction of same-sex female
desire in films from both Indian and Indian diasporic contexts. It will seek to determine what
level of cultural translation is being undertaken in the representation of both female same-sex
desire and Indian cultural identity in six films: Fire (India/Canada, Deepa Metha: 1996), Chutney
Popcorn (USA, Nisha Ganatra: 1999), Girlfriend (India, Karan Razdan: 2004), The Journey (India,
Ligy J. Pullappally: 2004), Nina’s Heavenly Delights (UK, Pratibha Parmar: 2006) and The World
Unseen (UK/South Africa, Shamim Sarif: 2007); exploring the role directorial nationality and
setting play in translating how lesbian desire is represented across cultural contexts. When the
earliest of these films, Fire, was released in India, it was met with so much indignation on behalf
of the public that some cinema theatres were destroyed as audiences rioted during the film’s
screenings. A later, more mainstream, Indian film featuring a lesbian relationship, Girlfriend
(India, Karan Razdan: 2004), was protested by both the religious right and Indian gay and
lesbian activists for its negative depiction of female homosexuality. The Journey (India, Ligy J.
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Pullappally: 2004), released in 2004, while directed by a filmmaker who had lived in the U.S. for
her adult life, was based upon a series of same-sex desiring youth suicides in the Kerala district,
and was shot on location in the local language, with efforts made within the film to emphasise a
sense of localism. The films Chutney Popcorn and Nina’s Heavenly Delights represent a different
context, set within Indian communities in diaspora in the United States and Scotland
respectively. What representational impact does this diasporic context have upon the narrative
and the ways in which both lesbian desire and Indian culture are articulated? Each of these films
share a more classically Westernised narrative structure than films set in India, such as Fire,
Girlfriend or The Journey, following the clear generic conventions of romantic comedy and the
coming out story. The World Unseen takes on yet another context that situates the Indian
community and its female protagonists in a liminal space in 1950s South Africa. Cultural
translations take place in each of these films to reflect the contexts of their directors, cast and
crew, and intended audiences.
Floriana Bernardi

Fatema Mernissi and cultural translation. Women and cyber-Islam.
My paper is intended to survey and describe the role of the Moroccan sociologist and
writer Fatema Mernissi as a cultural translator between the East and the West. Focusing on
Moroccan cultural specificities and deconstructing the several stereotypical representation of
her community as far as gender, media and education concerns, Fatema Mernissi has been
translating the actual system of values and cultural practices of the Moroccan society (and, more
generally Eastern societies) destroying those betrayed senses and common places which both
media and the different forms of art have engendered and transmitted throughout time.
Particularly, the paper will focus on the crucial role of IT, satellite televisions and the Internet to
deconstruct the stereotype of Arab women, mainly represented in the western imagery as
downtrodden, subdued to the patriarchal power and as sex symbols in tv commercials and
video clips. On the contrary, according to Fatema Mernissi, a mind-blowing civilizational shift is
happening in the Arab world and internet cafès are the places and means to foster it. In Internet
cafès people can access IT, socialize and discuss about political issues and ru’ya, that is a “clear
vision of the future where [the youth] have a role to play as defenders of an ethical planet
(Mernissi 2005: http://www.mernissi.net/books/articles/digital_scheherazade.html). There,
besides, young bloggers and social networkers meet to assure the circulation of internationally
relevant news – often protecting them from dictatorial censorship – and promote participation
to civic initiatives, which inevitably influence mainstream public discourse.
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Kinship in Walter Benjamin’s Task of the
14.00-15.00
15.00-15.10
Veronica O’Neil
Translator
Ruth J. Owen
Death by Cultural Translation
10 min break
Veronica O’Neil

Kinship in Walter Benjamin’s Task of the Translator.
Translation theory assumes difference: whether it is to obliterate it through
domestication or to emphasise it through foreignisation. Benjamin, with his emphasis on
kinship, shifts this focus, potentially reflecting a similar emphasis on cultural kinship and
placing the translator in the role of mediator.
Translation theory is characterised by opposing polarities. The literal/free debate often
takes centre stage, focusing on techniques used in the process of translation. Closely linked to
this is the debate about the relationship between source text (ST) and target text (TT), by
extension source language (SL) and target language (TL), and by further extension source
culture (SC) and target culture (TC). ST/L/C typically loses out, becoming swallowed and
regurgitated unrecognisable by domesticating techniques such as paraphrase and imitation. In
practical translation, this favouring of a domesticating approach to translation often goes
unquestioned. Schleiermacher opens the debate with ‘On the Different Methods of Translating’
(1813), and most theorists respond to him in some way, advocating either a foreignising
approach that favours the ST/L/C or a domesticating approach that favours the TT/L/C.
The importance of this debate cannot be overstated, however, whether the SL or TL is
favoured, the focus is still on the difference between languages. Such a focus assumes difference,
takes difference as its foundation. Benjamin, with his emphasis on kinship of languages,
removes this focus, and potentially reflects a similar emphasis on cultural kinship. Emphasis on
kinship does not strive to find (or create) likeness, as in ethnocentric translation, instead, the
fundamental relationship of the SL to the TL is central: the fact that they are both language.
With this kinship as fundamental, the need to find (or create) likeness is not so urgent, and
while difference between SL and TL is not removed, it is no longer perceived to be a problem. If
the translator is no longer starting from the point of trying to obliterate the difference of the SL
in the ST, and by extension the SC, they move into the role of mediator.
Ruth J. Owen

Death by Cultural Translation: Ophelia in German
Ophelia can be considered an instance of cultural translation across time, across media and
across languages. Shakespeare’s Hamlet constitutes the point of origin for centuries of Ophelia
texts and images. In Hamlet, Ophelia is the young girl in love, who loses her mind and dies in an
overhung brook. This figure, whose origin is English, theatrical and seventeenth-century, is
prolifically re-written in a tradition which is German, lyric and twentieth-century. Interrogating
the transmission reveals the translatability of Ophelia, with the concomitant loss of meanings
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and gain of meanings. This interrogation of the German Ophelia pursues the question of what
has facilitated her intercultural mobility. Part of the story of German culture’s local use of
Ophelia seems to be linked to the intense political force-fields in which German writers were
being read. Her afterlife in cultural translation coincides with the sustained politicization of
culture in the Weimar Republic, through Nazism, to postwar division. Whilst Ophelia’s nonGerman status may be essential, Shakespeare had been claimed uniquely German in spirit.
Ophelia not only comes loose from his Hamlet in English, but is continually incorporated into
new sets of meaning as she comes up against the discontinuities of German cultural history.
Later appropriations enter into dialogue with one another; they form clusters of connection to
each other; in the end, there is an Ophelia myth so embedded within German literature that it
goes on generating new texts and images, updating her, adapting her to different lyric modes.
My analysis shows that, above all, Ophelia survives in cultural translation as a drowned girl. To
open the channel between cultures seems to require female death and a body in, or at least near,
the water. This paper suggests that the textuality of her dying, and the gaps in Shakespeare’s
account, are crucial to her intercultural mobility.
15.10-16.10
16.10-16.20
Ariela Grosz-Rophe
Intellectuals as Culture Transmitters
Caterina Sinibaldi
Dangerous comic strips
10 min break
Ariela Grosz-Rophe

Intellectuals as Culture Transmitters
Cultures immigrate, or are translated in many ways. This paper focuses on the role of
intellectuals as culture transmitters. I will examine cultural translation as an import of cultural
elements from abroad, from the French cultural field, and their plantation in the local field of
Hebrew culture during the second quarter of the twentieth century. The Jewish settlement in
Palestine was an immigrants' society, in the process of nation building and creation of a
national culture – so these intellectuals undertook a difficult task. The intellectuals I would like
to present here were poets who studied in Paris and returned to Palestine carrying a load of
components of French culture. They struggled for the distribution and impregnation of these
foreign elements in the emerging Hebrew culture in the literary field as well as in the political
field against the local hegemonic imperatives. As intellectuals they were poets, but they also
published essays and articles in major daily Hebrew newspapers, spreading their ideas widely.
From the variety of cultural elements imported by these poets, I choose to concentrate on
poetical modernism; on some modernist ideas as universalism, and the rejection of nationalism
and of war; and on some behavioral patterns.
The analysis of their endeavor enables a detailed inspection of such a transference of
cultural components (their reception by conscious and unconscious processes, the strategies of
their dissemination) and some insights regarding the successes and the failures of efforts to
challenge the hegemonic cultural imperatives.
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Caterina Sinibaldi

Dangerous Strips. The reception of American comics under the Italian Fascist
regime.
The present paper aims to investigate the widespread success of American comics under
Italian Fascism and their subversive position within the Italian polysystem. Comic strips are a
relatively understudied phenomenon, which is nonetheless significant in relation to the role
played by translation in Fascism’s production of culture. As a narrative form which didn’t find
an equivalent in the target context, they introduced a new genre into the Italian literary system,
while also stimulating a national production. Moreover, since they addressed a particularly
vulnerable and valuable sector of Fascist society, comics are revealing of the norms of writing
and translating for children dominant at the time.
American comics were imported into Italy around 1910, and appeared for the first time
in the “Corriere dei Piccoli”, a popular journal for middle-class children. Officially despised and
yet privately enjoyed by most Italians, comics opened up the possibility of a different world, a
daunting perspective for a dictatorial regime. However, they were for long tolerated by Fascist
censors, who issued a first ban against them only in 1938, in occasion of the Bologna’s
Conference for Children’s and Youth Literature.
Drawing on the theoretical framework of Translation Studies, it is my intention to look
at the primary and operational norms that regulated the reception of comics, focusing on the
modes of selection and manipulation of the original products. Specifically, I will look at comics
as an interesting space where “alternative discourses” took place, within a highly controlled and
politicised cultural system such as that of Fascist Italy. My analysis will follow the different
phases of their reception, and will especially focus on their interaction with Italian comics, as
highly significant in revealing the process of identity negotiation involved in translation.
Moreover, it is my intention to examine the economic and ideological aspects which
contributed to the regime’s tolerance towards comics, as well as the reasons behind their
progressive rejection. Being comic strips a traditionally popular, “low” genre, the relationship
between the status of a text type and its strategies of translation will be also investigated. This
will lead to broader considerations about translating for children, as an activity which is subject
to special constraints, while also allowing for creativity and innovation.
Selected examples of both American and Italian comic strips will be shown, in order to
illustrate the different phases in the reception of foreign comics, and the dynamics of cultural
negotiation at stake.
Fists of confusion: Bruce Lee and Monolingual
16.20-17.20
17.20-17.20
Paul Bowman
Cultural Translation
David Huddart
Emblems of cultural translation
10 min break
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Paul Bowman

Fist of (Con)Fusion: Bruce Lee and monolingual cultural translation
The opening of Bruce Lee’s Fist of Fury (1972) depicts the funeral of a Chinese martial
arts master, in a Chinese school in the Japanese-dominated area of the Shanghai International
Settlement, circa 1908. This is already a fraught moment of cultural transmission: indeed the
eulogists expend most of their energy emphasizing to the assembled martial art students that
they know the correct way to preserve their master’s lineage and their tradition. But the funeral
is rudely interrupted by the arrival of belligerent representatives of a Japanese martial arts
school, who contemptuously present the Chinese with a large framed piece of calligraphic
writing, which reads “Sick Man of Asia”. The Japanese issue a challenge, via their translator, the
creepy and culturally and sexually ambiguous Hu En. The senior Chinese elders prevent any of
the Chinese students from answering the challenge, in order to preserve decorum.
At one key point a senior Chinese teacher addresses the translator, Hu. In the dubbed
English version, the Chinese senior asks Hu, “Look here, just what going on here?” In the English
subtitles, however, this exchange is rendered as, “Look here, are you Chinese?” These are
significantly different renderings. Hu’s answer in the subtitled version is that whilst he is
Chinese he shares a different destiny to them. In the dubbed version, however, Hu shortly
proceeds to speak of the superiority of “we Japanese”.
Deliberately without having sought to establish whether the different combinations of
Dutch and Mandarin subtitles and dubbing replicate this disjunction or introduce others, this
paper assumes the likelihood of these and other possibilities. It does so in order to explore
several interconnected issues of translation. Firstly, various theories of translation and their
imbrication in various models of culture and tradition; and secondly, Benjaminian arguments
about the text as construct – Fist of Fury is clearly a complex (and internally contradictory)
construct, with all sound added post-production and hence lacking any ‘original’ as such – and
the complexity of such putatively ‘simple’ popular cultural texts as Fist of Fury when approached
as the ‘arcades’ of ‘cultural translation’.
In order to explore such a massive set of problematics in such limited time and space,
the paper will focus specifically on the two key dimensions of this opening scene: first, the fact
that the funeral of the founder is already a fraught scene of rupture/tradition, transfer/loss,
continuity/disjunction – indeed, of cultural translation – here supplemented – secondly – by the
double, duplicitous (cultural) status of the (literal/linguistic) translator, Mr Hu. The reading of
this scene will be organised by Rey Chow’s contribution to theories of translation in her essay,
“Film as Ethnography; or, Translation Between Cultures in the Postcolonial World” (1995),
which itself begins from a consideration of the Italian expression “Traduttore, traditore” –
“Translator, traitor”.
David Huddart

‘アニメ and コミック: emblems of cultural translation’
This paper interprets Peter Carey’s Wrong About Japan (2005) as a text that foregrounds
cultural translation while simultaneously blocking it. Carey’s book fictionalizes a journey
undertaken to understand the international significance of anime and manga (or komikku): it
stages an intercultural encounter explicitly in order to understand an intercultural encounter.
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Carey, in desiring to explain cultural translation operating in one direction, occludes its
operation the other way, and implicitly assumes a kind of barrier to translation. He assumes this
barrier through a specific attitude to English in Japan, the presence of which is elided. Carey is
licensed to make his assumption by artists like Miyazaki Hayao, interviewed by Carey. With
other artists, Carey tests his theories about anime and manga, always to be made to feel ‘wrong
about Japan’. Miyazaki and Carey communicate ‘without language’ more effectively than Carey
communicates with the others. Miyazaki is scornful about comparisons with Disney (despite
Disney’s international distribution of Studio Ghibli movies), and insists upon an inviolable
cultural specificity: he functions to confirm Carey’s understanding of the uniqueness of the
culture being translated.
One example seems to back this assumption. While the translated title of Spirited Away
(2001) is useful, it cannot capture Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi, which takes some of its
meaning from a literal removal of language: strokes removed from kanji. English cannot capture
Japanese culture, and part of the attraction of manga for Carey is that English has been
‘vaporized’. However, this is only apparently the case, and the book pursues a strategy that
downplays the significance of English. Indeed, a notable treatment of the language comes in the
form of a fictional friend for Carey’s son, who confirms many stereotypes regarding Japanese
English. The book misses the cultural translation that is everywhere evident in the production
of Japanese English, which can be compared to other World Englishes. Rather than seeing
English as a form of cultural imperialism, it is increasingly recognized that English in Japan has
been acculturated: adapted for local requirements, only some of which involve translating other
cultural values for Japanese people. Carey’s work is elsewhere notable for its celebration of
adapted Englishes, most obviously Australian but also, for example, Malaysian; in eliding
Japanese adaptation, this specific book assumes a fixity of cultures, between which there is
movement, but only of the kind we expect and can account for in advance.
Sarah Maitland
First do no harm: Power, agency and cultural
17.30-18.30
translation in the post-colonial context
Alexis
Nuselovici,
Glenn The moiré effect
Davidson, Wyn Mason
Sarah Maitland

“First, do no harm”: Power, agency and cultural translation in the post-colonial
context
‘Cultural translation’ interprets one culture to another, rewriting the foreign and carrying it
‘across’ from its original context towards the receiving culture. This process of intercultural
encounter reshapes thoughts, ‘translating’ them between nations. Yet in a post-colonial context,
the extent to which this cultural translation symbolises cultural imperialism, or offers an
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opportunity for a new ethics of intercultural understanding, is a question that divides postcolonial critics and translation theorists alike.
This paper considers how cultural translation has been theorised both as an exploitative
device in the toolkit of empire, and as a hermeneutical opportunity to recognise and engage
with ‘otherness’. For some, cultural translation operates as a technology of appropriation,
exoticising and ultimately assimilating the ‘Other’ to the dominant norms of the translating
culture. The Derridean ‘différance’ inherent in the Other is thus re-written in the transparent
discourse of the receiving culture, and the reductive familiarity that results is linked to
ideologies of reception that choose certain texts over others, freezing them into ‘native
informants’ for their culture and therefore symbolising the asymmetrical power relations
between cultures. Yet others also view cultural translation as a process that interprets and
engages with the Other, rather than seeking to essentialise or appropriate it. By rewriting a
foreign experience in the receiving culture, translation from this perspective recognises and
respects the difference of the other, and it is this ‘untranslatability’ that causes us to re-examine
how we understand our own culture in relationship with others. This recognition of cultural
irreducibility – and the opaque ‘rhetoricity’ of which Spivak writes – effects a re-examining of
extant power relations and breaks down the barriers of essentialism that seek to ‘fix’ one
‘perfect’ meaning within the original work.
This paper will therefore interrogate the politics of translation and the process behind the
‘carrying across’ of works from one cultural context to another, examining how contemporary
theories of cultural translation conceptualise the practice of intercultural encounter as an
activity that both exacerbates power differentials between nations and respects the
fundamental irreducibility of cultural difference.
Alexis Nuselovici , Glenn Davidson, Wyn Mason

The moiré effect: a new paradigm for transcultural studies
The description and understanding of the new cultural landscapes drawn by the
contemporary massive forced or voluntary migratory movements need a new conceptual and
rhetorical lexicon. Images of bridges or thresholds are weak metaphors to express the realities
of transnational/transcultural identities and prove to be useless with regard to the problems of
social integration within European countries.
We propose to use the “moiré effect” as an analytical tool to approach this issue. The term
moiré (or moire) has itself a transcultural history, crossing the Arabic, French and English
languages and is used to designate a type of textile or pattern. It is also used in digital imaging
and computer graphics techniques to name a specific pattern formation (e.g., checkered surfaces
or multiple layering).
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Mieke Bal is Mieke Bal, a cultural theorist and critic, is Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and
Sciences Professor (KNAW). She is based at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA),
University of Amsterdam. Her areas of interest range from biblical and classical antiquity to
17th century and contemporary art and modern literature, feminism and migratory culture. Her
many books include A Mieke Bal Reader (2006), Travelling Concepts in the Humanities (2002)
and Narratology (3rd edition in press due for release in February 2009). Mieke Bal is also a
video-artist, her experimental documentaries on migration include A Thousand and One Days;
Colony and the installation Nothing is Missing. Her work is exhibited internationally.
Occasionally she acts as an independent curator.
Rebecca Beirne is the author of Lesbians in Television and Text after the Millennium (Palgrave
2008) and the editor of Televising Queer Women: A Reader (Palgrave 2008). She is a Lecturer in
Film, Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Newcastle, Australia, and her current
research monograph is a comparative history of the representation of lesbianism in world
cinema.
Floriana Bernardi is PhD Student in Theory of Language and Sign Sciences, University of Bari.
Paul Bowman is Director of the Race, Representation and Cultural Identity Research Group in
the School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies at Cardiff University. He is author of
Theorizing Bruce Lee (2010), Deconstructing Popular Culture (2008) and Post-Marxism versus
Cultural Studies (2007), editor of The Rey Chow Reader (2010), The Truth of Žižek (2006),
Interrogating Cultural Studies (2003), Reading Rancière (2010) and numerous journal issues,
including forthcoming issues of Social Semiotics, Postcolonial Studies, and Educational Philosophy
and Theory.
Glenn Davidson is a digital artist (Artstation,) and artist in residence, Chapter, Cardiff
University.
Sharif Gemie is Reader in History at the University of Glamorgan, who teaches on Nineteenth
and Twentieth Century Europe, principally France and Spain; Israel and Palestine; whose
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research interests include the histories of modern Brittany and modern Galicia (Spain) and the
experiences of refugees during the second world war. Sharif is author of Brittany 1750-1950: the
Invisible Nation (UWP, 2007), Galicia: A Concise History (UWP, 2006), French Revolutions, 18151914: An Introduction (Edinburgh University Press, 1999), Women and Schooling: Gender,
Authority and Identity in the Female Schooling Sector, France, 1815-1914 (Keele University Press,
1995), and is currently completing a book on the experience of Arabs in Europe.
Ariela Grosz-Rophe is based in Tel-Aviv, and works across several disciplines: history, history of
intellectuals or cultural history, cultural sociology, and literature. Her PhD is entitled
‘Intellectuals Between Cultures: From French Modernism to the Field of Hebrew Culture (19201948)’.
David Huddart is a lecturer in the Department of English at the Chinese University of Hong
Kong. He is author of Postcolonial Theory and Autobiography and Homi K. Bhabha.
Sarah Maitland is a doctoral candidate at the School of Languages, Literatures and Performing
Arts, Queen’s University Belfast, where she is researching cultural translation, community
relations and interculturality. Her academic interests include post-colonial translation theory;
hermeneutical approaches to the foreign in translation; and theory and practice of translating
for the stage. Before commencing her doctoral studies, Sarah worked at the United Nations as a
researcher and has managed an international peacebuilding and community relations research
programme in Northern Ireland. She is a practising translator of contemporary Spanish drama,
and a number of her translations have been published and produced for the stage. Her recent
work includes Agrippina, by Fermín Cabal, Hurbinek’s Mapmaker, by Juan Mayorga; and Mad
King Ludwig, by Lourdes Ortiz.
Wyn Mason is senior lecturer in the Department of Media and Communication, University of
Glamorgan.
Alexis Nuselovici is Professor of Modern Cultural Studies at Cardiff University. His research
interests
focus
on
two
main
areas:
European
culture
and
Translation
Studies.
His other areas of research include cultural expressions of exilic and diasporic experiences,
cultural hybridity and métissage, convergence between Black memory and Jewish memory,
aesthetics of modernism and postmodernism, Holocaust literature.
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Veronica O’Neil is a PhD student at NUI Galway. Her PhD focuses on Walter Benjamin on
translation.
Ruth J. Owen is Senior Lecturer in German at Cardiff University. Her research focuses on
German poetry. She has written about the relationship between political history and poetry,
with respect to the ‘Wende’ of 1989 and the impact of unification. Further publications have
explored questions of national identity, as expressed in poetry about urban landscapes;
contemporary poetry about science; and the representation of the human body in poetry
through different eras of the twentieth century. More recently, she has been working on how the
Ophelia figure from Shakespeare’s Hamlet has been appropriated by German-language culture.
Caterina Sinibaldi is a PhD research student in the Department of Italian at Warwick
University, UK. Her PhD title is Translating for Children in Italy under the Fascist Regime.
Conference Organising Committee:

Dr Paul Bowman, Director of the Race, Representation and Cultural Identity Research
Group

Dr Rachael Langford is co-Director of the Representing Migration and Mobility in
European Cultures Network

Professor Alexis Nuselovici is Professor of European Cultural Studies

Dr Margaret Topping is co-Director of Representing Migration and Mobility in European
Cultures Network
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