2009 Speakers:

Albert Braz is an Associate Professor of comparative literature and English at the University of Alberta. He specializes in Canadian literature in both its national and inter-American contexts, and is especially interested in authorship, historical fiction, hybridity, translation, and transculturation. He is the author of The False Traitor: Louis Riel in Canadian Culture (2003). He also has translated essays by José Saramago and written articles on the English translations of such works as Mário de Andrade's Macunaíma and Maurice Constantin-Weyer's La bourrasque.

Ann De León is an Assistant Professor of Latin American Literatures and Cultures at the University of Alberta. She is particularly interested in Latin American Indigenous cultural production, codices, the Aztec language, translation, and theory of the body. Ann has published a book translation, Spanish King of the Incas (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005) and some articles on Mexican archaeology. She is currently investigating how 19th century scholars interpreted and used Aztec material culture for projects on Mexican nation formation.

Roman Ivashkiv is a PhD student in the department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies, University of Alberta. He received his Master’s Degree in Translation Studies and ESL from the Ivan Franko National University of L’viv, Ukraine, and his second Master’s Degree in Russian and Comparative Literature from Pennsylvania State University, State College, PA. His research interests are Ukrainian, Russian, and American postmodern literatures and Translation Studies.

Nadezhda Korchagina is a PhD student at the University of Alberta, Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies. She received an MA in Translation from Kent State University in 2006 and an MA in Slavic Languages and Literature from the University of Toronto in 2007. Her research interests include literary translation and Russian émigré literature.

Anne Malena is a literary translator and Professor of French and Translation Studies at the University of Alberta. She has published French translations of two novels by Kristjana Gunnars (La Maraude, Leméac 1995, nominated for the Governor General Literary Award in Translation, and Degré Zéro, Leméac 1998) as well as several short stories and poems. Her translation of Claudine Potvin’s Pornographies, a short story collection, is looking for a publisher.

Lynn Penrod is Professor of French (MLCS), Lecturer in Law, and Director (Human Research Protections) of the U of A's Research Ethics Office. Her research and teaching involve French women writers, consumer culture, children's literature, and translation studies. She is eagerly anticipating her upcoming yearlong sabbatical in 2010.

Tom Priestly is Emeritus Professor of Russian Language and Slavic Linguistics at the University of Alberta, where he taught from 1970 through 2002. His research area was principally in the sociolinguistics and political linguistics of the Slovene-speaking minority in Austria. He began translating Slovene literature, mostly poetry, in the 1980s, and has translated or co-translated works from Prešeren (b. 1800) through contemporary poets.

Zeb Raft teaches pre-modern Chinese literature at the University of Alberta. His interests are in the poetry, poetics, and the culture of poetry in pre-modern China, and one of his active projects involves a database catalog of translations of Chinese poetry into English.

Miki Sato is an Assistant Professor at Research Faculty of Media and Communication, Hokkaido University. She obtained an MA in Comparative Literary Theory from University of Warwick, UK, and a PhD from Hokkaido University, Japan. Her PhD dissertation is on norms for English literary translation in Japan. Her current research interests include the relationship between literary translation and its academic contexts, socio-cultural analysis of discourse on translation, sociology of translation and sociology of cultures.