Between Differences, Across Divides: A Translation Seminar Series

In collaboration with Literatures, Cultures, and Language Studies, this sequence of panels and workshops for faculty, students, and the wider public focus on theories and practices of translation both as forms of cross-cultural communication and as tools to address power imbalances and promote social justice across national, social, and disciplinary boundaries.

The series kicked off on September 18, 2025, with the panel “Creative Crossovers: Translators as Fiction Writers” featuring two distinguished literary translators who are also engaged in creative writing as authors of novels and memoirs.

Jennifer Croft translated Polish Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights ( for which she received the 2018 International Booker Prize) and The Books of Jacob (a finalist for the Kirkus Prize). She is also the translator of Argentine writers Federico Falco (A Perfect Cemetery), Romina Paula (August), and Pedro Mairal (The Woman from Uruguay).

Her novel The Extinction of Irena Rey, for which she won a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship, was among The Wall Street Journal’s 10 Best Books of 2024, and has already been translated into nine languages. She received the 2020 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing for her illustrated memoir Homesick. 

In 2023, she received an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature. Her memoir on pregnancy and postcards will be out with Catapult Books in 2026.

Lily Meyer translated Peruvian writer Claudia Ulloa Donoso’s Little Bird and Ice for Martians, Spanish writer Clara Usón’s The Shy Assassin, ​Cuban journalist Abrahám Jiménez Enoa​’s The Hidden Island, ​Bolivian writer Rodrigo Hasbún​’s The Invisible Years​, and Spanish neuroscientist Susana Carmona​’s Neuromaternal (forthcoming).

​She is the author of the novels Short War and the forthcoming The End of Romance (2026). She is also a contributing writer at The Atlantic. Her stories and translations can be found in journals like The Dial, The Drift, The Sewanee Review, The Southern Review, and her essays and criticism appear in outlets including Bookforum, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Book Review.

Lily Meyer also offered the first two multilingual workshops in the “Translation for Everyone” series, inviting translators at all levels of experience to explore, collaborate, and play with translation. Mixing theoretical conversation and in-class translation exercises, these workshops aim to both strengthen and expand participants’ ideas about what a translation can be.

On October 14, 2025, “How to Start a Translation” discussed multiple strategies to approach a text to be translated.

On November 4, 2025, “Domesticating/ Foreignizing” recast what is too often seen as a binary in translation—do we make the text sound as if it were originally written in the target language? Or do we call attention to its foreign-ness? –as a pair of important tools to use at will.

Humanities student Jacquelin Gordon featured the translation seminar series in The Voice.