Laying the Center's Foundation

A welcome from Aron Aji, our Director

Welcome to the first issue of our newsletter for the Center for Translation and Global Literacy, at the University of Iowa. This new National Resource Center was made possible through a $1 million, four-year grant from the U.S. Department of Education. 

In 2022-23, the Center sponsored faculty workshops and provided curriculum development grants for new or redesigned courses, in support of our brand new BA in Translation. In 2023-24 we look forward to sponsoring more programs and activities that directly respond to the critical national need for translation and global literacy education. We believe education for global citizenship is essential to navigate the increasingly complicated interconnected world; our Center programs reflect this.

As educators, scholars, professionals and advocates, you are already familiar with our aspirations. We hope our Center can function as an intellectual and creative commons for all of us. We look forward to forging cross-institutional relationships so that everyone’s efforts and know-how will gain greater visibility and collaborative force to effect wider-scale change about translation education beyond our immediate environments.

Please visit our new web site and follow our work this year and beyond!

Inviting Applications:

2024 Summer Institute on Translation Across the Curriculum

"The Undergraduate Curriculum: Programs, Courses, and Activities" is the focus of the 2024 Summer Institute on Translation Across the Curriculum, which will be held in Iowa City from June 5-9, 2024.

Co-Sponsored with The American Translation and Interpreting Studies Association, the Summer Institute is a four-day residential gathering featuring a combination of lectures, roundtables, syllabus design workshops, discussion sessions and individual tutorials. The organizers encourage participation by faculty at all stages in their career, advanced graduate students, and administrators with interests in the following areas: 

• theoretical approaches to translation as asset-building pedagogy
• design and implementation of translation-related activities, courses, tracks, or programs
• career exploration and concrete training for students interested in the language industry 
• comparative grammar and comparative stylistics as ways to foster a greater understanding of the asymmetries among world languages.



Information about the 2024 Summer Institute and Application Form can be found here. 



Questions? Email  ctgl-connect@uiowa.edu  

Raquel Gutiérrez Translates

CTGL's First Residency

Author Raquel Gutiérrez is not a translator in the strictest sense, but much of their writing serves as translation of the cultures to which they belong. “I’m someone who is constantly described with a very distinct set of adjectives--Queer, Latinx, U.S.-born Mexican, Chicana,” says the poet, essayist, and critic, continuing to list descriptors that frequently get tied to their name. “My upbringing is a convergence of customs, cultures, languages, dialects, and accents.”

In April 2023, Gutiérrez visited Iowa City as the first recipient of the Center for Translation and Global Literacy’s Residency program. They met with students in the Translation program and performance arts, and gave public talks at Prairie Lights Books, the Iowa City Public Library, and as part of Mission Creek Festival.

Among the work they shared was Brown Neon, a collection of essays that is a 2023 Lammy Literary Award finalist. In the book, which is categorized as memoir, Gutiérrez writes about the language that underpins their experience as the child of El Salvadoran and Mexican parents, as a working class kid from South Los Angeles—a place where one can live happily without “a lick of English”--and as a “professional queer.” 

Student Travel Grants Awarded

Five students embarked on summer research

The initial round of CTGL Student Travel Grants was given to five University of Iowa students to support their travel associated with translation-related projects. We hope the $10,000 total in support will enhance our students' ability to do work on location, including archival research, interviewing, or interning with a community organization.

The awardees are:

• Sofía Balbuena (MFA, Spanish Creative Writing) traveled to the Dominican Republic where she interviewed writers, performers and cultural activists and consulted the capital's libraries.
• Jordan Barger (MFA, Literary Translation) traveled to Norway to study the manuscripts of Sigbjørn Obstfelder in the archives of Edvard Munch.
• Tony Santi (BA and BFA in English and Creative Writing) was in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt to research and translate Sonallah Ibrahim's novel Life and Death in a Colorful Sea.
• Melanie Carbine (PhD, Literacy, Culture, and Language Education) collaborated with the Marshallese Consulate for the Continental U.S. in Arkansas to develop resources specific to professional development for translators of Marshallese.
• Ilie Shirin (MFA, Literary Translation) hosted a writer’s and translator’s workshop in Berlin, Germany.

Workshop Offers Asset-based Pedagogical Tools to Iowa K-12+ Educators

A dozen Iowa teachers participated in "Translation as a Tool for Change in Today's Classroom," the first CTGL-hosted workshop for K-12+ World Language Teachers. Held over the course of three sessions that began in March 2023 and culminated in June, the workshop shared ways to draw on students’ full linguistic repertoires in the process of second language acquisition. 

Led by Belén Hernando-Lloréns and Pam Wesely, faculty in the College of Education, the hands-on sessions helped participants reframe translation and global literacies as asset-based pedagogical tools that build on students’ skills, identities, and knowledges in a world languages classroom.

Gayatri Spivak Speaks, October 12

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, the world-renowned scholar, literary theorist and translator, will be visiting Iowa City to give a lecture on “Translation! Ever New, Ever Elusive”.

Gayatri Spivak co-founded the UI's MFA in Literary Translation Program, together with Daniel Weissbort. Her talk will be the inaugural Weissbort-Spivak lecture, in celebration of the 50^th anniversary of the Literary Translation program and the 60^th anniversary of the Iowa Translation Workshop.

This event is made possible by the Maureen Robertson Fund, and will be held on Thursday October 12, 2023, 6:30 PM at the Old Capitol Senate Chamber.

Meet Diana Thow

Translation Faculty Fellow in Residence

This fall, Diana Thow joins the University of Iowa as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Translation. The three-year appointment includes opportunities to teach graduate and undergraduate courses and provide mentorship to emerging translators. Thow holds a PhD in

Comparative Literature from University of California Berkeley (2020) and an MFA in Literary Translation from the University of Iowa (2008). Her 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. She is working on a book about translations of poetry by women in Italy and the U.S. during the 1930s and 40s.

Course Redesign Grants Highlight Translation

Seven faculty members in the Division of World Languages and Literature garnered summer funding to incorporate techniques, methods, and structures into courses they will teach this academic year. The recipients and their courses are:

• Roxanna Curto, Topics in French Studies II: Sport and Society in the French-speaking World 
• Kirsten Kumpf Baele, Anne Frank & Her Story
• Wenyang Zhai, Chinese Literature: Poetry 
• Luis Martin-Estudillo, Translation Workshop: Spanish to English
• Ana Rodríguez-Rodríguez, Don Quixote
• Kendra Strand, Traditional Japanese Literature in Translation
• Peter Gerlach, Global Citizenship
• Bela Shayevich, Heritage Narratives