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.

Course Management for Department of Asian and Slavic Languages and Literatures, Department of French & Italian, Translation Programs, BTAA CourseShare, and WLLC courses. Graduate Coordinator for French and Literary Translation

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.

Nataša Ďurovičová divides her time between editing, teaching, scholarly work, and translating. She is the editor of International Writing Program’s imprint 91st Meridian Books, and its journal 91st Meridian. A co-editor of World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives (2010; the winner of SCMS's 2011 Best Edited Collection award) and At Translation's Edge (2019), she is one of the two translators of André Bazin on Adaptation: Cinema's Literary Imagination (2022). She runs IWP’s International Translation Workshop, and in 2023 co-curated the exhibit "A Hub, A Network, an Archive: 55 Years of International Writers in Iowa City."

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). 

Jake Goldwasser is a poet and a translator from Dutch and Judeo-Spanish. His translations have appeared in the Baffler and elsewhere, and his translation of Judith Herzberg's short book "Landschap" was published by Circumference Books. He holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Iowa.

Emily Graham is a writer and translator of contemporary French poetry. From Cleveland, Ohio, she lived in Connecticut for four years before returning to the Midwest, where she is currently an MFA student in literary translation at the University of Iowa. Her work has been featured in Asymptote, New England Review, Modern Poetry in Translation, and is forthcoming in Fence. She is the recipient of the 2022 World Literature Today Student Translation Prize in Poetry for her translation of Baros’s poem “Je sors dans la rue avec l’ange.”

Grace translates from Mandarin (simplified and traditional characters) and Japanese. They obtained their BA in Chinese Language and Literature and Japanese Studies from Middlebury College in spring 2021. While there, Grace translated three short stories from the late Chinese-American author Yu Lihua for their thesis, and then a short story of Yoko Ogawa's under the instruction of Stephen Snyder. She's mostly interested in fiction. Hobbies include eating sweets, reading, sleeping, and taking pictures of their cat. 

Jack Rockwell is a literary translator, writer and editor. His translation of Julia Kornberg's Berlin Atomized is forthcoming from Astra House in August, 2024. Other translations and original writing have appeared in The Chicago Review of Books, Words Without Borders, Latin American Literature Today, and other publications. He is currently an MFA candidate at the Iowa Translation Workshop, where he is Editor-in-Chief of Exchanges: A Journal of Literary Translation. More at jack-rockwell.com. 

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.

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 Rhetoric. Her interests include US-culture, immigration, media studies, music, and theatre.

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.

Gabbie holds a bachelor’s degree in English. She taught English Language Learning in the Clear Creek Amana School District and worked in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Office of the Dean prior to becoming Division Administrator for the Division of World Languages, Literatures, and Cultures in 2023. Her interests include building sustainable staffing and communication structures; fostering a strong multicultural community; and supporting the Division in its mission to advance interdisciplinary research, artistic creativity, global awareness, and the study of languages, literatures, linguistics, societies, regions, and cultures. She collaborates with the staff team and faculty leadership to facilitate administrative operations and strategic planning.

Kathleen Maris Paltrineri is a poet and literary translator. She holds an MFA in Literary Translation from the University of Iowa (2021) and an MFA in Poetry from the University of New Hampshire (2013). Previously the CLAS Postgraduate Visiting Writer of Literary Translation, she has also taught creative writing and literature at the University of Iowa, creative writing at Cornell College, and English as a Second Language at the University of New Hampshire. She is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, a Lois Roth Endowment Award, and a Stanley Graduate Award for International Research. Her translation of Norwegian poet Kristin Berget’s og når det blir lyst blir det helt fantastisk is forthcoming from Northwestern University Press. For her own poetry, Paltrineri has received scholarships and residencies from USF Verftet, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and Jentel Artist Residency. Her poems are forthcoming from Bone Boquet and are currently on exhibit at Neue Galerie Berlin as part of Traces, a group show of Arctic Circle Residency participants.

Kaija Straumanis is an award-winning translator from the Latvian, and editorial director at Open Letter Books. Her published translations include works by Inga Ābele, Zigmunds Skujiņš, Jānis Joņevs, and Gundega Repše, among others. Her current projects include FOREST DAUGHTERS (MEŽA MEITAS, ed. Sanita Reinsone), for which she received a 2020 NEA Literature in Translation fellowship, and THE RIVER by Laura Vinogradova (forthcoming next year from Open Letter Books), one of three titles in Open Letter’s 2024 Translator Triptych, which Straumanis also curated.