Dr. Jill Beckman is the Director of the Division of World Languages, Literatures, and Cultures (DWLLC), DEO of the Translation Program, and Associate Professor of Linguistics.

Aron Aji, Director of MFA in Literary Translation, has joined the faculty in 2014. A native of Turkey, he has translated works by Bilge Karasu, Murathan Mungan, Elif Shafak, LatifeTekin, and other Turkish writers, including Karasu’s The Garden of Departed Cats, and A Long Day’s Evening. His forthcoming translations include Ferid Edgü’s Wounded Age and Eastern Tales, and Mungan’s Tales of Valor (co-translated with David Gramling). Aji was president of The American Literary Translators Association between 2016-2019.  He leads the Translation Workshop, and teaches courses on retranslation, poetry and translation; theory, and contemporary Turkish literature.

Jan is a translator and critic of literature written in Afrikaans, Dutch, English, and French. He holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Cornell University. His academic work focuses on translation theory, critical contemporaneity, and world literature. He is the editor of Translation: Crafts, Contexts, Consequences (Cambridge University Press 2022). And he is currently working on a monograph entitled World Literature for the Times: How Translations and Adaptations Create Contemporaneity. 

Adrienne is an interdisciplinary scholar, translator, and writer. Her academic work focuses primarily on Latin, Greek, and Classical Chinese languages and literatures with special emphasis on the poetics of retranslation, experimental, intersemiotic, multimodal translation practices, east-west cross-cultural literary studies, translation and humanitarian crises, and world literatures. She is also interested in book arts and the intersections of material culture and reading. From time to time, she writes a column on translation, poetry, and classics for the Society for Classical Studies’ blog.

Meredith Mahy Gall is the senior academic advisor for the Division of World Literatures, Languages, and Cultures (including all world languages, International Studies, linguistics, and translation) and global health studies students.

Andy has an M.A. in Linguistics with a focus on teaching English as a second language from the University of Iowa. His professional interested include language instruction, the promotion of inclusive learning environments, and instructional technology and design. He has studied Russian, French, Italian, and German in the classroom and enjoys working with faculty and students in the division to aid, promote, and enhance the learning of languages.

Roxanna is a specialist in 20th-century French and Francophone literature and culture; postcolonial and literary theory; Latin American theatre; and comparative Caribbean studies. Her book, Inter-tech(s): Colonialism and the Question of Technology in Francophone Literature examines the representation of modern technologies in the works of Francophone writers from Africa and the Caribbean. She has also published articles exploring connections between Aimé Césaire and Latin American literature, and on technology in 20th-Century French poetry.

Denise is an Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. She is the author of Performing Women in the Middle Ages: Sex, Gender, and the Iberian Lyric, which includes poetry translated to English from Galician-Portuguese and Castilian. Her teaching and research interests include medieval Spanish literature, women in literature, performance, and North African-Spanish cultural contacts from 711 to the present. Her current book project examines stories about the conquest of Iberia in Arabic and Hispano-Latin historiography. Denise Filios coordinates the undergraduate minor in Translation for Global Literacy.

Brian teaches in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and is involved with cultural theory and Comparative Literature. His research has focused on Latin American cultural studies, particularly modern Mexico, with an emphasis on social and literary theory. He is the author of Redefining the Lacandón: Subaltern Representations in the Rain Forest of Chiapas (University of Arizona Press), a study of how indigenous populations in the jungle of southern Mexico have been depicted in a variety of media since the time of the conquest. Brian Gollnick teaches the literary translation workshop in Spanish.

Kendall Heitzman translates contemporary Japanese fiction and poetry. His translation of Fujino Kaori’s Nails and Eyes (Pushkin Press, 2023) was awarded the Japan-United States Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature. He has published translations of several IWP participants including Nakagami Nori and Shibasaki Tomoka in venues such as Cha and the US-Japan Women’s Journal, and his translations of Furukawa Hideo appear in recent issues of the literary journal Monkey. He is a co-editor of the Cornell Anthology of Contemporary Japanese Poetry, forthcoming from Cornell University Press, for which he is translating work by several young Japanese poets. See his main faculty page for his academic profile and a list of publications. He teaches the Japanese-to-English translation workshop.

Waltraud is professor of German and teaches courses on German literature and culture. She has authored Hexen  – Huren – Heldenweiber. Bilder des Weiblichen in Erzähltexten über den Dreißigjährigen Krieg, which examines the representation of women and femininity in a wide range of narrative texts from the seventeenth century to the present that retell the Thirty Years War. Maierhofer also coedited Women Against Napoleon: Historical and Fictional Responses. Out of her interest in the connections of literature and art, Maierhofer has completed critical editions of letters by the painter Angelica Kauffmann, a travel book on Florence by Adele Schopenhauer, as well as a bilingual edition of the opera libretto Circe with the translation by Goethe and Christian August Vulpius.

Ana directs the MFA program in Spanish Creative Writing. She has published seven books of poems including Preparativos para un viaje(winner of the Adonais Prize in 1994), Juegos de niños (winner of the Fray Luis de León Prize in 2003), Compañera de celda (2006), and Curación (Accésit Jaime Gil de Biedma Prize, 2010). Her poems appeared in over twenty anthologies, and have been translated into Portuguese, English,  German, Slovenian, French, Dutch, Bulgarian, and Italian. Merino has written criticism on comics and graphic novels. including El cómichispánico, and a monograph on Chris Ware. Merino is a member of the board of directors of the Center for Cartoon Studies and has curated four comic book expositions.

Christopher works across genres with books that include four collections of poetry; translations of the poetry of the Slovenian Aleš Debeljak; several edited volumes; and books of nonfiction, including Things of the Hidden God: Journey to the Holy Mountain, The Grass of Another Country: A Journey Through the World of Soccer, The Old Bridge: The Third Balkan War and Only the Nails Remain: Scenes from the Balkan Wars. His work has been translated into twenty-five languages. He has held a professorship at the College of the Holy Cross, and now directs the International Writing Program at The University of Iowa.

Thomas Mira y Lopez is the author of The Book of Resting Places (Counterpoint Press, 2017). He holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the University of Arizona and is an editor of Territory, a literary project about maps, as well as a fiction editor at DIAGRAM. He translates from Brazilian Portuguese and is originally from New York.

Laura teaches in the undergraduate Translation program and is managing editor of the online journal Ancient Exchanges. She holds master's degrees in Literary Translation and Classics from the University of Iowa and a graduate certificate from the UI Center for the Book. She specializes in translating ancient Greek poetry.

Yasmine received her PhD from the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University. Between 2012-2014 she was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Middle Eastern Studies Program and the Newhouse Center for the Humanities at Wellesley College. Her research and teaching interests include modern Arabic literature, the Arabic language, comparative literature, post colonialism, and spatial theory. Her current book project, Shifting Ground: Space in Egyptian Fiction, examines the fiction of the sixties generation in Egypt, through literary depictions of urban, rural, and exilic space. She has been published in Journal of Arabic Literature, Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, and Arab Studies Journal.

Ana M. Rodríguez-Rodríguez is an Associate Professor specializing in Early Modern Spanish Literature.  She has published articles on Christian-Muslim relations in the Mediterranean during the 16th and 17th centuries, and on Early Modern women's writing. She is also the author of Letras liberadas. Cautiverio, escritura y subjetividad en el Mediterráneo de la época imperial española. Madrid: Visor Libros, 2013, a book exploring Spanish textual manifestations of captivity during this period. She is currently writing a book on Spanish presence in the Philippines during the first centuries of Spain's colonial rule of the archipelago, and preparing a critical edition of the Libro de cassos impensados, by Alonso de Salamanca.

Diana Thow is a literary translator and scholar working from Italian. She holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from UC Berkeley (2020) and an MFA in Literary Translation from the University of Iowa (2008).  Her academic research areas include Translation Studies, translation pedagogy, poetry and poetics, gender and translation, the translator's archive, Italian, French, and Anglophone literatures from the 19th century to the present and her publications include “Translation Pedagogy in the Literature Classroom: Close Reading and the Hermeneutic Model of Translation,” in L2 Journal: The Future of Translation in Higher Education (Fall 2021). She is currently at work on a book project about translations of poetry by women in Italy and the USA during the 1930s and 40s. As a literary translator she has received a Best Translated Book Award, and her publications include Close To The Teeth by Elisa Biagini, translated with Sarah Stickney, Autumn Hill Books (2021) and Hospital Series by Amelia Rosselli, Otis/Seismicity Books (2017). 

Mars Grabar Sage is a poet, a baker by trade, and a translator from French and Old English. They're interested in queer poetics and embodiment, science fiction, and interrogating the ethics of translation. Mars received a BA in comparative literature from Yale University, where they specialized in 20th century Algerian literature. For their bachelor's thesis, they produced a translation with commentary and analysis of selected poems by Anna Gréki.

Ida Hattemer-Higgins is an MFA candidate in literary translation at the University of Iowa, where she translates prose, poetry, and literary theory from German, French, Swedish, and Chinese, and teaches the undergraduate translation workshop. She is also a novelist published by Alfred A. Knopf in the US and Faber & Faber in the UK. Her translation of A Tale from the Coast by Birgitta Trotzig, a classic of Swedish modernism first released in 1961, is forthcoming from Archipelago Books.

Fabienne Rink is a journalist and translator of German and French literature who was born and raised in Germany close to Cologne. She received her BA in Journalism from TU Dortmund University and worked as a journalist for WDR (West German Broadcasting Company) and in PR for “Theater Dortmund”. Fabienne is currently pursuing an MFA in Literary Translation at the University of Iowa and an MA in Literary and Cultural Studies at TU Dortmund University. She is also a Graduate Teaching Assistant in German and Rhetoric. Her interests include US-culture, immigration, media studies, music, and theatre.

Gleisson Alves Santos is a translator, educator and researcher who engages with these practices through an artistic and interdisciplinary approach. He is a second year MFA student in Literary Translation, translating from and into Portuguese, and a Teaching Assistant in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. One of his translation works into English involves a body of contemporary poems by Afro-Brazilian poets. As a Graduate Teaching Assistant, he has been teaching courses such as Intermediate Portuguese and Brazilian Narrative in Translation.

Miharu Yano (she/they) grew up in Tokyo and New York. She translates to and from Japanese and studied literature and translation at Waseda University and University of Oxford.

Bela Shayevich is a Soviet American writer and translator. She is best known for her translation of 2015 Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich’s Secondhand Time, for which she was awarded the TA First Translation Prize. Her other translations include Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We and Vsevolod Nekrasov’s I Live I See, which she cotranslated with Ainsley Morse. Her writing has appeared in n+1, Jewish Currents, and Harper’s Magazine.

Leah Leone Anderson translates literature and criticism from Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese. Her scholarship includes the monograph Borges's Creative Infidelities: Translating Joyce, Woolf and Faulkner (Bloomsbury, 2024) and the book chapter "A Battle of Expectations: A Room of One’s Own’s Resistance to Borges’s Anti-Feminist Translation Strategies" (Bloomsbury, 2025). Her most recent translation work includes 16 chapters from The Oxford Handbook of Jorge Luis Borges (2024) and Vicente Lecuna's A Promising Past: Remodeling Fictions in Parque Central, Caracas (U of Pittsburgh, June 2025). She holds a Ph.D. in Spanish American Literature and an MFA in Literary Translation from the University of Iowa.

Jessica Cohen is an independent translator born in England, raised in Israel, and living in Denver. She translates contemporary Hebrew prose and other creative work. In 2017, she shared the Man Booker International Prize with David Grossman, for her translation of A Horse Walks Into a Bar. She has also translated works by major Israeli writers including Amos Oz, Etgar Keret, Ronit Matalon and Maya Arad. She is the recipient of National Endowment for the Arts and Guggenheim fellowships.

Emma Athena Murray is a writer, editor, and translator of Spanish literary works. After seven years as a journalist reporting at the intersection of geography, public policy, and social justice, she pivoted into the truth-telling spheres of world literature. With a double-BA in Philosophy and English from Brown University, she continues to interrogate the world through written words, and her research interests include both contemporary and 16th-17th century female voices from Latin America; how feminine rage manifests in literature; the alchemic powers of translation; and autotheory as literary craft.

Katharina is a German and English translator and a prospective high school teacher. She received her Bachelor of Arts in German, English and Educational Science. She is currently pursuing a certificate in Literary Translation at the University of Iowa as well as a Master of Education at TU Dortmund University. Her main interests include U.S. politics and culture, history and poetry.