The World Englishes Committee Welcomes Film Scholar Anu Thapa

The World Englishes Committee is pleased to announce that Anu Thapa, a film scholar and first-year Marion L. Brittain Fellow in the Writing and Communication Program, has recently joined our ranks. Anu’s specialties include Cinema and Media Studies, Digital Humanities, and Postcolonial Theory. She is currently spearheading the committee’s forthcoming initiatives related to global cinema (more information to come). We are excited to have her expertise and look forward to working with her .

As we have done in the past, we asked Anu a few questions (as we do with all of our new committee members) to help us get to know Anu better. We also asked her to fill out the Pivot questionnaire, and you can find her answers to that here, along with those of our other committee members.

Why did you want to be part of this committee?

I wholeheartedly subscribe to what Chimamanda Adichie calls the “danger of a single story.” (This TED talk is worth watching!) I would extend it further to the danger of a single way to tell/write/visualize stories. As a film scholar, I think about and work on the plurality of cinemas and cinema languages. World Englishes, which thinks about the heterogeneity of the English language, perfectly fits my academic and non-academic pursuits.

What do you like best about teaching?

I teach film, so we watch a lot of films in my courses. I like showing my students bizarre and foreign films. Getting their reactions during class discussions and seeing how their attempts to make sense of these films progresses by the end of the semester is a really humbling and rewarding experience. Equally humbling are moments when they detest a film you love.

If there weren’t a pandemic and you had a bit of free time, how would you choose to spend it?

Going to the movies!

What is the best movie you’ve seen in the last year?

Steve McQueen’s Lover’s Rock. Absolutely gorgeous and sensual. It is also the only film I have seen during the pandemic that hasn’t given me anxiety over watching an enclosed space packed with bodies touching, writhing, and breathing at each other. This pandemic has definitely changed how I watch and experience movies.

What is the book you want to read most but haven’t had a chance to read yet?

Tough to only name one, as it is an occupational hazard to collect books you want to read but haven’t had a chance to read. This meme sums me up in this context:

Translation and Literary Magazines

As a creative writer and literary magazine editor, I love reading brand-new work in brand-new, hot-off-the-press issues of my favorite literary magazines. They come in the mail, in orange bubble mailers, having never even been opened. The spine stiff with freshly congealed glue pops and cracks as I turn the pages. I hold it near my face and breathe in. Mmmm.

While there are innumerable contemporary literary magazines publishing online and in print, including several at Georgia Tech, such as EratoTerminusAtlanta Review, and of course RAMBLE, I would like to focus this post on literary magazines that are engaging with the important work of literary translation. As a junior in college, I was first introduced to the world of contemporary literary translation by a professor, Steven Stewart, who was translating works by Spanish-speaking writers such as Rafael Pérez Estrada, Ana María Shua, and Eduardo Milán. As a result, I, too, was compelled to engage with literary translation and even published a translation of a poem by Emilio de Marchi in my university’s student-run literary magazine during my senior year.

During my first semester teaching at Georgia Tech, I sat on a MARTA platform waiting for my train, reading a collection of poems by Wislawa Szymborska. As I was about to pass through the train doors and find my seat, a man approached me and, noticing the book in my hands, commented in a Polish accent how brilliant Szymborska was. I replied, smiling, that I thought so too, and then we each located our seats in different parts of the train car. This encounter encapsulates the kinds of intersections that literary translation promotes, not just between readers and texts, but among people of many nationalities, cultures, languages, and experiences. Literary translation allows poets and audiences to meet who otherwise might never have crossed paths. It removes linguistic barriers that impede access to new ideas and new situations. Without translation, the man on the train and I would likely never have spoken, brief though our encounter was, and though I would never have known it, I believe I would have been poorer as a result of that missed connection.

As a former member of the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA), I feel that literary translation plays an important role in making literature accessible to international and transnational audiences. Poetry@Tech, an organization at Georgia Tech whose “mission is to bring high-profile and celebrated poets, as well as new and exciting voices, to Atlanta, and to share the art of poetry with Georgia Tech students and the communities across Georgia,” is currently engaged in this kind of valuable cultural work. For instance, as part of the Atlanta Poetry and Translation Festival, in October 2020 Poetry@Tech held a reading involving a number of poets from Germany, and in March 2021 will host a group of poets from Belarus.

Here is a brief list of just a few contemporary magazines who are also using their publication platform as a means to promote translated works by writers all over the world, as well as their own descriptions of their mission as it relates to literary translation.

Alchemy

Alchemy is committed to publishing quality, contemporary translations of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction creative writing. By dedicating our journal to the publication of high quality translations by students and emerging translators, we aim to encourage a new generation of translators. We publish creative translations and adaptations, including homophonic, homolinguistic, and other poetic forms. It is our belief that translation can teach us new things about writing and about language itself. We look forward to publishing work that is fresh, engaging, and thought provoking. Alchemy is based in the University of California, San Diego’s Literature and Linguistics departments and is edited and published by UCSD students.”

Asymptote

“Winner of the 2015 London Book Fair’s International Literary Translation Initiative Award, Asymptote is the premier site for world literature in translation. We take our name from the dotted line on a graph that a mathematical function may tend toward, but never reach. Similarly, a translated text may never fully replicate the effect of the original; it is its own creative act.

“Our mission is simple: to unlock the literary treasures of the world. (Watch a video introduction of Asymptote here.) To date, our magazine has featured work from 121 countries and 103 languages, all never-before-published poetry, fiction, nonfiction, drama, and interviews by writers and translators such as J. M. Coetzee, Patrick Modiano, Herta Müller, Can Xue, Junot Díaz, Ismail Kadare, David Mitchell, Anne Carson, Haruki Murakami, Lydia Davis, Ann Goldstein, and Deborah Smith.”

Cagibi

 is invested in sharing the universal human experiences to be found in works of prose and poetry set within places unfamiliar to readers; thus, our expressed interest in international—or world—literature, and works in translation.  is versatile in its purpose and mission to readers and writers. The journal concerns literature in which character conflict, ultimately story, is tied to place. The retreats provide unique and stimulating place experience. In one interpretation, le cagibi is the place at which a writer’s inspiration is rendered into story, or shaped into poem.”

Circumference

“Circumference is a journal whose mission is to support poetry in translation; primarily translations of new work from around the globe, new visions of classical poems, translations of foreign language poets of the past who have fallen under the radar of American readers, and pieces that illuminate translation as a vibrant, necessary interaction. Through our website we facilitate conversations about international literature and translation in real-time, and promote dialogues that enliven our sense of what it means to bring new work into English.”

Ezra

“An Online Journal of Translation, is a forum for poetry and translation. We hope to stimulate the under-explored arts of reading in other tongues and translating for an English audience. We aim both for new knowledge of world writers and for the creation of beautiful new works. Ezra is interested in any form, style, tone or era.

“We dedicate ourselves to the spirited interplay of cultures, and to the presence of the laurel itself in the act of literary translation: to the transformative, promethean, synthesizing essence of poetry.

“Ezra hopes to have more writers live and work in the space between cultural and linguistic constructs — just as poetry lives in betweenness.

“Beyond the love of languages — their sounds and separate geniuses — we are alert to the occasional translation that is (as Márquez said of Rabassa) better than the original. We dedicate ourselves to the successes — mysterious and many — that await literary translators.”

Metamorphoses

Metamorphoses is the journal of the Five College Faculty Seminar on Literary Translation. Published in the spring and fall, the journal provides a forum for literary translation out of, and into, all languages, and for papers on the theory and practice of literary translation.”

To find other magazines looking for and publishing literary work in translation, click here.

“Apologies for Cross-posting”: CFPs in the Digital Humanities

Introduction

After combing through the DHSI listserv, that steady pipeline of hidden gems for academic projects, we found more than a few CFPs and announcements, several of which overlap with the topics and issues with which the editors of this website are interested in. Here are a smattering of these opportunities:


CFP for “Right to Left” at DHSI 2021—Online Edition

We are soliciting papers related to digital work in any living or historical RTL language such as Arabic, Azeri, Hebrew, Kurdish, Ottoman, Persian, Syriac or Urdu. Possible topics might include RTL languages and cultures seen from any of these angles:

  • bidi/multidirectionality
  • digital culture in RTL societies
  • open social scholarship
  • digital pedagogy
  • integrating RTL into global digital humanities
  • platforms and user experience
  • transliteration practices (e.g., Arabizi, P/Finglish)
  • internationalization/localization (e.g., interface translation)
  • adapting and building digital resources and methods (e.g., RTL XML)

Please send 200-word abstracts and participant bios to rtlright2left@gmail.com by February 25, 2021.
Accepted participants will prepare a pre-recorded short talk (10 mins) which will be posted in advance of the conference on a password-protected site available to conference registrants. During the conference there will be a two-hour live discussion of accepted papers.

A publication of papers from this year’s conference is anticipated along with previous two years in the open access journal Interdisciplinary Digital Engagement in Arts & Humanities (IDEAH).


CFP: Representation and Recovery–ADE Virtual Annual Conference
Well-funded digital archives have energized the field of documentary and scholarly editing, yet the recovery of content by women, Indigenous people, Black people, People of Color, and other underrepresented groups has suffered setbacks since the 1990s. For editing and other communities, the recovery of marginalized voices was long hampered by funding sources that focused interest on well-known and canonical historical figures. And even though the interests of funding organizations have shifted in the context of changing technologies and constituencies, the field has been slow to respond. Increasingly, however, new funding sources and technologies are enabling documentary editors, textual scholars, historians and other interdisciplinary scholars, educators, genealogists, family historians, students, librarians, archivists, church historians and other community groups to bring marginalized voices and artifacts to light.

The ADE Program Committee solicits presentations for panels and individual papers on recovery broadly, including efforts of small-scale projects; rare or marginal texts; texts and artifacts produced by women, Indigenous people, Black people, People of Color and other marginalized groups; texts that dislodge the single author model; the exploration of the ways in which scholarly editions, archives, and pedagogical recovery projects can avoid reproducing colonization/marginalization; the ways in which editors can offer context to historically famous figures to avoid placing them on a pedestal; and the role that new technologies, social media environments, editorial institutes, and community groups play in advancing these objectives. We welcome projects and individuals in all disciplines and at any stage of their career, as well as those who engage in public history and advancing knowledge beyond the academy.

Please submit inquiries and 300-word abstracts and brief bio(s) to Noelle Baker (noelle.baker@me.com) by 1 March 2021.

Potential topics include but are not limited to:

  • Initiatives to support peer review of and recovery work by marginalized figures
  • Editing and minimal computing in the Global South
  • Community recovery work
  • Teaching with recovered materials in K-12 classrooms
  • Digital technologies, accessibility, and the broadening/democratizing of knowledge
  • Recovering hidden voices and stories through their interactions with canonical figures
  • Editors’ responsibility to engage with emerging scholarship adjacent to their figures
  • Decolonializing archives, records, and editions (including but not restricted to metadata, bibliographies, and indexing) for the discoverability of marginalized and underrepresented groups
  • Challenges and strategies in placing historic (and imperfect) figures in context in 2021
  • Editorial institutes and expansive definition(s) of what constitutes digital recovery
  • Editorial treatment of understudied documents for which encoding is scholarship
  • Pedagogical experiments with micro editions and recovery
  • Teaching an imperfect past in 2021
  • Decolonialized approaches to recovery
  • Social editions, new platforms, and more democratic models of recovery
  • Creating discoverability for underrepresented individuals via county/state sheriffs’ records, professional licensing records, store ledgers, and other related records

NEH is Hiring! Program Specialist in the Division of Preservation and Access:

Full Information: https://www.usajobs.gov/GetJob/ViewDetails/589725600

Open & closing dates: 01/19/2021 to 02/09/2021

The National Endowment for the Humanities is an independent grant-making agency of the government dedicated to supporting research, education, preservation, and public programs in the humanities. The Division of Preservation and Access provides leadership and support for a sustained national effort to preserve and increase the availability of resources important for research, education, and public programming in the humanities.

The Program Specialist assists with administrative activities that support managers and program officers in the Division of Preservation and Access. The duties of this position are focused on supporting the review of complex grant applications administered by the Division, including making analytical decisions and recommendations on actions as may be appropriate as to assure accurate administrative control for compliance with applicable Division and Endowment regulations, procedures, and policies as well as:

  • Participates in grant program management through monitoring workflows, distributing materials for outreach, and review of proposals.
  • Provides guidance to applicants on inquiries regarding specific grant programs within the division.
  • Participates in the administration of application review by conducting statistical analyses of application and awards.
  • Writing humanities content for public audiences.

Qualifications

Professional experience working in a cultural heritage organization, university, or with grants

A Bachelor’s degree in a discipline of the humanities is required (a Master’s degree in the humanities, library & information science, museums studies, or a related field is preferred).

Conditions of Employment: U.S. Citizen; Relevant experience and/or education; Favorable background investigation; Males born after 12/31/1959 must be registered with the Selective Service

Grade: GS 11

Salary: $72,750 to $94,581 per year

Appointment type: Permanent

Work schedule: Full-Time


Call for Reviews: Information & Culture
James Hodges will soon be the new Senior Book Reviews Editor for Information & Culture journal (https://infoculturejournal.org/). He writes:

“I’m especially interested in bringing a more global and multicultural range of subject matter to our review pages. This means that while our general focus on the social and cultural influence of information remains unchanged, I am eager to seek out books and reviewers with origins and expertise in areas beyond the Anglosphere and Global North.

Do you have a book coming out that fits with the editorial mission of Information & Culture?
Is there a new or upcoming book that you would like to review?

If so, please contact reviews@ischool.utexas.edu to let us know!

We are also currently seeking reviewers for the following titles:

A History of Data Visualization and Graphic Communication
Michael Friendly, Howard Wainer; June 2021
https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674975231

Burning the Books: A History of the Deliberate Destruction of Knowledge
Richard Ovenden; November 2020
https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674241206

Please get in touch via reviews@ischool.utexas.edu if you are interested in reviewing these or other titles.

More information: Information & Culture is an academic journal printed three times a year by the University of Texas Press. It publishes original, high-quality, peer reviewed articles examining the social and cultural influences and impact of information and its associated technologies, broadly construed, on all areas of human endeavor. In keeping with the spirit of information studies, we seek papers emphasizing a human-centered focus that address the role of and reciprocal relationship of information and culture, regardless of time and place.

The journal welcomes submissions from an array of relevant theoretical and methodological approaches, including but not limited to historical, sociological, psychological, political and educational research that address the interaction of information and culture.”
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