Speaker Bios

Information about the two keynote speakers, David Bellos and Douglas Hofstadter, can be found here.

More speaker bios will be posted soon; please check back.

Mohammed Al-Batineh is a PhD candidate in the Translation Studies Program at Kent State University. He received his B.A. in English Language and Literature from Yarmouk University in Jordan and his M.A. in English-Arabic Translation from the same university. After obtaining his M.A., Mohammed taught Arabic-English translation at the University of Hail in Saudi Arabia. He is currently a freelance translator and an active member in the Jordanian Translators’ Association. His research interests include: Cultural Studies, Translation and Ideology, Stylometry, Corpus-based Translation Studies, and Computer-Aided Translation. Mohammed’s in-progress PhD dissertation adopts methods from stylometry and authorship attributions to discuss the notion of translator style by analyzing the translational and the authorial style of Denys Johnson Davies in his translations and creative writings.

Jeffrey Angles is Associate Professor of Japanese literature, language and Translation studies at Western Michigan University. He is the author of Writing the Love of Boys: Origins of Bishōnen Culture in Modernist Japanese Literature, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. He is also an award-winning literary translator of modern and contemporary Japanese poetry and fiction, including Takahashi Mutsuo’s Twelve Views from the Distance and poetry by Tada Chimako and Itō Hiromi.

Brian Baer received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1996. His research interests include Russian translation history, translation and censorship, discourse analysis in translation studies, and the pedagogy of translation. He is the translator of Stories by Mikhail Zhvanetsky and Not Just Brodsky by Sergei Dovlatov. He is the co-editor of Beyond the Ivory Tower: Rethinking Translation Pedagogy (John Benjamins, 2003) and the author of the monograph Other Russias (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), which was awarded an ALA Choice Award in 2011. Dr. Baer is the founding editor of the journal Translation and Interpreting Studies (John Benjamins) and the general editor of the KSU Monograph Series in Translation Studies. His article "Literary Translation and the Construction of a Soviet Intelligentsia" was anthologized in Translation Studies (Routledge, 2009), edited by Mona Baker. His most recent publications include the volume No Good without Reward: Selected Writings of Liubov Krichevskaia (U of Toronto), and the edited collections Contexts, Subtexts and Pretexts: Literary Translation in Eastern Europe and Russia (John Benjamins) and Russian Writers on Translation. An Anthology (St. Jeromoe). From 2007-2010 Dr. Baer represented Slavic languages on the Advisory Board of the PMLA and currently sits on the board of the American Translation and Interpreting Studies Association (ATISA).

Loubna Bilali is a PhD candidate in Translation Studies at Kent State University. She holds Master's degrees in Translation (French-English) from Kent State and in Cross Cultural Communications and Translation Studies from Chouaib Doukkali University in Morocco, where she also completed her undergraduate studies in English Linguistics. As part of her graduate fellowships, Loubna is responsible for teaching language and translation technology courses at the Institute for Applied Linguistics at KSU. Loubna’s research interests are varied, including localization, terminology management, corpus-based research, and translation pedagogy. A lifelong learner, Loubna actively seeks ways to assess the localization of websites and computer applications into Arabic. Her in-progress PhD dissertation presents a needs analysis study of localization between market demand and training.

Arnold Castelain studies both clinical psychology and Chinese culture and language at the Université Paris Diderot 7. For two years he has been working as a clinical psychology intern with Chinese patients, in co-operation with Chinese interpreters. The research he carried out led him to present his work at the Translation Studies Center of the University for Humanities of Paris and write an article entitled "L'interprète dans la situation clinique" that is to be published at the journal for psychoanalysis Essaim. He looks at the Psychologist-Interpreter-Patient situation from a psychoanalytical point of view.

Antoine Cazé is Dean of the Humanities and Professor of American Literature at Université Paris Diderot (France); he is the Director of the Master’s Program in Professional Literary Translation and the Co-Founder of the Center for Translation Studies at the Institut des Humanités de Paris (Paris Diderot). A specialist of modern and contemporary American poetry, Prof. Cazé is also an award-winning literary translator and a former board member of the French Association for Literary Translators.

Weijia Du is a doctoral candidate at the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her major field is modern Chinese literature and film. Her doctoral dissertation is titled ‘Exchanging Faces: Dubbing Foreign Films in China, 1949-94’. Her papers, “Adaptations and Receptions: Proof of the Man in Japan and China” and “Beyond the Ideology Principle: the Two Faces of Dubbed Foreign Films in PRC, 1949-66” have been respectively accepted for publication at Asian Cinema and Journal of Chinese Cinemas.

Karen Emmerich is a translator of Greek poetry and prose. Her co-translation with Edmund Keeley of Yannis Ritsos’s Diaries of Exile (Archipelago 2013) was awarded the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, and her translation of Poems (1945-1971) by Miltos Sachtouris (Archipelago 2006) was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle award. She is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University.

Michael Emmerich is Associate Professor of Japanese literature at UCLA. He is the author of The Tale of Genji: Translation, Canonization, and World Literature, and the editor of Read Real Japanese Fiction and New Penguin Parallel Texts: Short Stories in Japanese. He has translated more than a dozen books from Japanese, including most recently Bullfight, The Hunting Gun, and Life of a Counterfeiter, all by Inoue Yasushi.

Earl Fitz and conference chair Elizabeth Lowe were students of Gregory Rabassa in the early 1970's at The City University of New York and went on to both teach, write about, and practice literary translation throughout their academic careers. They co-translated Clarice Lispector's iconic work, Agua Viva (The Stream of Life, 1988). 

Ezra E. Fitz is the translator for Grammy winning musician Juanes, Emmy winning journalist Jorge Ramos, and contemporary Latin American novelists Alberto Fuguet and Eloy Urroz.  He is also the author of an original novel, "The Morning Side of the Hill," published in 2014.

Teresa Greppi is a PhD student in Iberian Spanish Literature and Culture at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is also working toward a Graduate Certificate in Translation Studies. Her research focuses on the peripheries of the Spanish “nation” and on Castilian and Catalan representations of the linguistic and cultural identities of regional and gender minorities.

Danielle Hunt is an instructor in the Department of Interpretation at Gallaudet University and has been teaching as full-time faculty since the fall of 2013. She began working as an American Sign Language-English interpreter professionally in 2000 and her specialty in the field is performing arts interpreting. She is currently in the process of finishing her dissertation looking at the lived experiences of professional identity development of American Sign Language-English interpreters. Her other research projects have included action research for tracking students' progress; employing adaptation principles of translation; and expertise in signed language interpreting.

Isabel Lacruz received her PhD in Experimental Psychology from Kent State University where she is now Assistant Professor of Translation Studies. She teaches doctoral courses on Translation and Cognition and Empirical Research Methods for Translation, as well as master level translation practice courses. Lacruz’ current research interests include investigation of the mental processes involved in translation and post-editing. She has published theoretical and empirical articles on cognitive aspects of translation and post-editing.

Elizabeth Lowe is the founding director of the University of Illinois Center for Translation Studies and the MA in Translation and Interpreting. She is a literary translator, specializing in 19th to 21st century Brazilian and Portuguese prose fiction. Her latest translation is the diaspora novel Happy People in Tears (Gente Feliz com Lágrimas) by the Azorean writer João de Melo, forthcoming by Tagus Press.

Vesna Lušicky is a researcher and trainer at the University of Vienna. She holds a degree in Translation Studies and International Business Administration. Her research interests include collaborative processes in transcultural communication, e-research, translation project management, and multilingual terminologies. She has been involved in a number of European and national research projects (CLARIN, Language Technology Observatory, TransCert, LISE – Legal Language Interoperability Services).

Françoise Massardier-Kenney is Professor of French and Director of the Institute for Applied Linguistics at Kent State University where she teaches in the graduate program in translation. She is the editor of the American Translators Association Scholarly Series.  Her publications include the monograph Gender in the Fiction of George Sand (2001); the edited volumes of Translating Slavery: Gender and Race in French Abolitionist Writing 1780-1830 (1999, 2009), and Ourika and Its Progeny (2010) with Doris Kadish; a translation of Madame de Duras’ Ourika (1999), Sand’s Valvèdre (2007), of Antoine Berman’s Toward a Translation Criticism (2009); and numerous articles on Sand, nineteenth-century women’s writers, and translation. She is the co-editor with Carol Maier of Literature in Translation (2010).

Muira McCammon is a Beinecke Scholar and Master's student in Translation Studies at the University of Massachusetts - Amherst. After graduating Phi Beta Kappa with a B.A. in International Relations/French from Carleton College, she worked last year as a Fulbright English lecturer in eastern Turkey. Her research interests lie at the intersection of law, politics, and translation, primarily focusing on prison libraries and the complexities of multilingual cyberspace. Her Twitter handle is @FRPolTweets, and she uses that virtual platform to make the Tweets of Nicolas Sarkozy, François Hollande, and Marine Le Pen available to an Anglophone audience.

Rita Elena Melian Zamora graduated in English Language and Literature, and German Language (University of Havana, Cuba), with focus on Translation and Interpretation. She worked as Translation and Bilateral Interpretation Professor at the University of Havana (2008-2012) and as interpreter and translator for Prensa Latina Press Agency in Cuba (2008-2011). She is currently doing her PhD at the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP), Brazil, in the field of Translation.

Christopher D. Mellinger is Assistant Professor of Spanish at Walsh University, where he teaches medical translation and interpreting as well as courses on Spanish for healthcare. Mellinger holds a Ph.D. in Translation Studies and a M.A. in Translation (Spanish) from Kent State University. Mellinger is an ex-officio board member of the American Translation and Interpreting Studies Association and the managing editor of the journal Translation and Interpreting Studies. His research interests include translation and cognition, translation process research, and translation technology.

Patricia Minacori is Associate Professor at Université Paris Diderot, France. A former technical translator, now in charge of two courses development in technical communication, she has been teaching technical translation for almost 30 years. She now also teaches technical communication in a Master's Degree. Her research is on complexity, exchanges between technical communicators and translators, translation assessment.

Tam Thanh Nguyen is currently working on his PhD in Culture and Globalization in the Graduate School of Intercultural Studies at Kobe University. His thesis is titles, Indirect Translation in literature- The case of Japanese literature in Vietnam. His research interests include the translation of Japanese literature in Vietnam and the historical role of Indirect translation in cultural exchange.

Rajeshwari V. Pandharipande is Professor (Emerita) of Linguistics, Religious Studies, Sanskrit, Comparative Literature, Asian American Studies, and Campus Honors Program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is on the permanent Committee
on South Asian Studies at the University of Chicago. The primary focus of her research and teaching has been South Asian languages (Syntax, Scoilinguistics, and Literature), Asian Mythology, Sociolinguistics, Sociolinguistic Methodology, Language of Religion, and Hinduism in India and in Diaspora. Additionally, she is a poet, and has published one book on poetry and has presented her poem at various gatherings.

Patricia Phillips-Batoma received her Ph.D. in French from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She teaches courses for the professional track of the MA in Translation and Interpreting, as well as courses for the certificate program. Her research interests include translation studies, the pedagogy of translation and languages for specific purposes, and medieval French literature.

Esther Eugenia Puig Rojas earned her Bachelor’s Degree in Communications with a Minor in Creative Writing from Casa Grande University at Guayaquil (Ecuador), and currently she is pursuing a Master’s degree in Translation and Interpreting Studies at UIUC. Esther has more than 10 years of professional communication and marketing experience with both for-profit and non-profit companies. She also worked for UNICEF in her country; this experience changed her view of life, and nourished her interest in Language and Translation.

Lane Schwartz works at the intersection of human and machine translation. His research includes work in statistical machine translation, computer-aided translation, and cognitively-motivated language models. Dr. Schwartz holds a B.A. from Luther College with minors in German and Theatre/Dance. He earned an M.Phil in Computer Speech, Text and Internet Technology from the University of Cambridge, and a Ph.D in Computer Science from the University of Minnesota. He is one of the original developers of Joshua, an open source toolkit for tree-based statistical machine translation, and is a frequent contributor to Moses, the de-facto standard for phrase-based statistical machine translation.

Elias Shakkour is Instructor of Interpreting for the MA in Translation and Interpreting. He holds a BA in German from Colgate University as well as three MA degrees: one in German from Middlebury College, one in Conference Interpretation from the Monterey Institute of International Studies, and one in Linguistics from the University of Illinois. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Linguistics at the University of Illinois. Elias grew up bilingual in Arabic and English in Israel, where he attended an American School in Jerusalem. In addition to his fluency in English, Arabic, and German, he is proficient in Spanish, French, and Hebrew and has some knowledge of Italian and Dutch. He is certified by the American Translators Association for Arabic-to-English, German-to-English, and Spanish-to-English translation.

Krista Slagle is PhD candidate (abd) in the Comparative Literature department at the KULeuven. Her primary and secondary research concerns Translation Studies, francophone and Post-Colonial Literature. Results from her research appear in her most recent, “Islands without Borders: Teaching the Caribbean through the Vehicle of Translation Studies,” in Reimagining the Caribbean: Conversations among the Creole, English, French, and Spanish Caribbean, in Lexington Press book series After the Empire: The Francophone World and Postcolonial France (2014). Krista has presented this research at the 2013, 2014 MLA conventions. She participated in the Toni Morrison Society’s Translation Workshop (Paris, 2010). Krista attended the CETRA research program, 2008. Krista taught Translation Studies at the Institut Supérieur de Traducteurs et Interprètes (Haute École de Bruxelles).

Robert Tierney is Associate Professor of Japanese literature in the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His publications include Monster of the Twentieth Century: Kōtoku Shūsui and Japan’s First Anti-Imperialist Movement, (forthcoming University of California Press); “Othello in Tokyo: Performing Race and Empire in Early Twentieth Century Japan,” Shakespeare Quarterly 62(4), December 2011; and Tropics of Savagery: the Culture of Japanese Empire in Comparative Frame (University of California Press, 2010). He has translated Japanese fiction from the colonial period.

Luc van Doorslaer is the director of CETRA, the Centre for Translation Studies at the University of Leuven (Belgium), where he works as an Associate Professor in Translation and Journalism Studies. He is also the Vice Dean for Research (Antwerp campus). As a Research Fellow he is affiliated with Stellenbosch University (South Africa). Together with Yves Gambier, he is the editor of the online Translation Studies Bibliography (10th release 2013) and the four volumes of the new Handbook of Translation Studies (2010-13). Other recent books edited include Eurocentrism in Translation Studies (2013) and The Known Unknowns of Translation Studies (2014). His main research interests are: journalism and translation, imagology and translation, institutionalization of Translation Studies, bibliometrics.

Zhaoyi Wu is currently a fourth year undergraduate student majoring in psychology and is a perspective student in translation studies program in UIUC. She will be graduating in two months. She is interested in the field of conferencing interpreting with Chinese as language A and English as language B.

Katalin Young is currently pursuing her Master's in Translation Studies at UIUC, and she is in the interpreting track. Although her primary language of concentration is Spanish, she has also studied Mandarin, French, ASL, and Catalan. This summer, she hopes to (finally) learn Japanese.

Florence Xiangyun Zhang teaches in Chinese Studies Department at Université Paris Diderot (France). She is a member of the East Asian Civilizations Research Center (CRCAO). Her main research areas: translation theories, literary translation in China, theatrical language translation, translation of spoken style language in literature. She is also translator from French to Chinese. She has been here at UIUC for the conference of 2010.

Xiaochun Zhang is currently working as a research assistant and finalizing her PhD on game localisation in China at the University of Vienna, Austria. Meanwhile, she lectures Chinese as well as Chinese and English translation. She was educated at Nanjing Normal University (BA in Applied English), P. R. China, and received her MA in Translation Studies from the University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom. She is an external collaborator of Transmedia research group, who has involved in research projects on both national and EU levels. Her research interests lie primarily in audiovisual translation with a specific interest in digital games localization and fan-subbing. She has several publications on game localisation and film subtitling in the context of China.

Min (Leonora) Zhou is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Translation, The Chinese University of Hong Kong. She holds an M.A in practical literary translation and an M.Phil in translation studies with concentration in the Chinese translation of Shakespeare’s sonnets. Her doctoral dissertation focuses on the English translation of classical Chinese lyrics with close attention to the interaction between two lyric systems through translation. Her research interests include poetry translation, translation criticism, lyric and narratology.