Dr. Jill Beckman is the Director of the Division of World Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, as well as the DEO and Associate Professor of German.

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.

Jennifer Bjornstad is the Translation Program Assistant for the Division of World Languages, Literatures, and Cultures. She coordinates and performs overall administrative support for the Translation Program.

Cinzia teaches courses in Italian language, literature, and culture. Her research interests include futurism, modernism, and contemporary Italian women writers. Her work as a translator includes Contemporary Italian Women Poets: A Bilingual Anthology (with L. Trubowitz), Carlo Michelstaedter's Persuasion and Rhetoric (with R. Valentino and D. Depew), and Susanna Tamaro's novel Anima Mundi. She is the author of Rewriting the Journey in Italian Literature: Figures of Subjectivity in Progress and The Other Modernism: F. T. Marinetti’s Futurist Fiction of Power, and she edited Futurism and the Avant-Garde (spec. issue of South Central Review).

Claire Breger-Belsky graduated from Stanford University in Spring 2020 with a BA in theater and performance studies—their undergraduate thesis focused on Yiddish theatre—and a minor in translation studies. They currently translate from Spanish and hope to eventually work in Yiddish and Ladino as well.

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.

Paul is an assistant professor of Ancient Mediterranean Religions with a joint appointment in Classics and Religious Studies; his specialty is the religions of Late Antiquity, with a focus on early Christianity. Paul's research explores a substantial variety of writings in Greek, Latin, Coptic, Syriac and middle Iranian languages, including the dynamics of cultural interaction and literary translation: the question of “world literature” as it relates to Late Antique Eurasia. He is also a Digital Humanist with interests in collaborative translation and online publication. As an undergraduate, he was a poetry editor for the Harvard Advocate.

Natasa grew up in Czechoslovakia and Sweden. She has studied at the University of Lund,  University of California at Santa Barbara and at UCLA. She divides her time between editing, teaching, scholarly work, and translating. Her courses include the IWP Translation Workshop, Translation and Globalization, and Translation and Media. She edits the IWP's digital humanities project, Walt Whitman--Song of Myself, that brings together translations of the poem across world languages. With Kathleen Newman, she co-edited World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives.

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.

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

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.

Sabine I. Gölz is the author of The Split Scene of Reading: Nietzsche/Derrida/Kafka/Bachmann, numerous articles that have appeared in PMLA, New German Critique, Germanic Review, Substance, Public Culture, Benjamin Studien, and edited volumes. Her advanced and graduate courses have focused on Fyodor Dostoevsky, Søren Kierkegaard, Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, Ingeborg Bachmann, and on topics such as “The Gender of Language” and “Geometries of Literary and Cultural Spaces.” Gölz also works in visual media. Her photographs have been exhibited in Russia, France, and the U.S, and several of her documentaries have won awards and screened at festivals in Europe and the US.

Kendall Heitzman’s research focuses on postwar Japanese literature and film, memory studies, and translation. He is working on a study of the “translational/transnational” Japanese poets who came to prominence in the 1960s. He has published translations of stories by Nakagami Nori in Cha and by Shibasaki Tomoka and Fujino Kaori, together with critical introductions, in the US-Japan Women’s Journal. He is the author of Enduring Postwar: Yasuoka Shōtarō and Literary Memory in Japan (Vanderbilt University Press, 2019). He teaches the Japanese-to-English translation workshop.

Mirgul Kali translates from her native Kazakh. Her translations of short stories by classic and contemporary Kazakh authors appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Electric Literature, Exchanges, The Massachusetts Review, and other publications. She is a recipient of the 2018-2019 American Literary Translators Association's Emerging Translator Mentorship and co-founder of Turkoslavia, a collective of translators working from Turkic and Slavic languages.

Anna Magavern graduated from Brown University with a BA with Honors in Comparative Literature, spending a semester studying literature at Université Paris 8. She translates poetry and prose from French. Currently, she is particularly interested in works associated with Surrealism.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

I was born in Germany and grew up in Costa Rica and Berlin. I got my Bachelor’s degree in Cultural Sciences and Spanish Philology (2012), as well as a Master’s degree in Comparative Art and Literature (2016) at the University of Potsdam in Germany. For the past four years, I have been teaching German as a second language and working as a freelance translator in English, Spanish and German in Costa Rica, mostly academic work but also other projects like artists’ catalogs (Elia Arce, Valentina Murabito) and a documentary (Lifting the green Screen).

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. 

Muhua Yang studied Comparative Literature and Classical Languages at Harvard University, where they worked on experimental translations of exilic poetry from Ovid’s Tristia. They translate from Latin and Chinese. Their interests include film and media theory, science fiction and fantasy, the essay, Latin elegy, 21st century visual culture, and the poetics of time and space.