December 7
4:00-5:30 PM & 6:30-8 PM
Space 2435, North Quad
Demos and Discussions with designers and scholars of digital games of translation.
Please register for the event by using this form:
https://forms.gle/oJY63jYBC6bdWXUd6
Overview
Invited speakers will discuss their own experiences working on projects of translation and/or digital networks in the arts and humanities, as the Translation Networks team members consider possibilities for future development. This event follows up on the panels held virtually February 18th, 2022 when invited speakers discussed the history of HathiTrust and its collaboration with the Google Digitization project, with a focus on materials published in non-roman writing systems.
4-5:30pm: Translation
Christi Merrill will introduce practical questions of multilingual research in the HathiTrust Digital Library by highlighting versions of the vetala/baital storytelling cycle featured on the poster. Carolyn Shread will reflect on the practice of translational exchange by talking about the concept of anarchy in Catherine Malabou’s philosophical writings that she is currently translating. Nathan Langston will then offer an introduction and behind-the-scenes glimpses at the collaborative Telephone Game to consider the imaginative leaps required when soliciting and coding ongoing creative exchanges. The session will be chaired by Benjamin Paloff.
5:30-6:30 Dinner Break
(In-person attendees who have preregistered will be offered a boxed dinner from El Harissa)
6:30-8pm: Networks
How to adapt the hierarchies and binaries of digital applications to the specific needs of humanistic research endeavoring to make connections across languages, writing systems and modes? The later panel will feature Chris Warren offering more behind-the-scenes looks at the digital project on Francis Bacon he led development on and Rini Bhattacharya Mehta talking about her project archiving the music of Bengali author and Nobel Prize winner Rabindranath Tagore. The session will be chaired by Maya Barzilai.
Invited Speakers
Carolyn Shread is Senior Lecturer in French at Mount Holyoke College and since 2013 has taught as a faculty exchange at Smith College, where she sits on the advisory board of the Translation Studies Concentration. Her research areas include 20th-century and contemporary French and Francophone literature, with a special interest in Haitian literature and in women’s writing. She is also actively involved in the field of translation studies and is on the advisory board of the Nida FUSP Center for Advanced Reasearch in Translation in Rimini, Italy. She has published six translations by contemporary French philosopher Catherine Malabou, including most recently Pleasure Erased: The Clitoris Unthought, recipient of a 2022 French Voices Award. She has written on the intersection of translation and Malabou’s signature concept, plasticity, as well as introducing Bracha Ettinger’s psychoanalytic concept of metramorphosis as a means of rethinking translational paradigms with a feminist lens. She published several articles on her process translating Marie Vieux-Chauvet’s Les Rapaces and is on the editorial board of the Haitian journal Legs et Littérature.
Nathan Langston graduated from University of Oregon with a focus in poetry. He has toured to almost every US state with bands and helped start both Ballet Collective and Satellite Collective in New York, composing scores for interdisciplinary works of ballet and modern dance. Nathan created and ran the first game of TELEPHONE, published in 2015, and initiated the second game in March 2020. He currently works as a software designer for cybersecurity in Seattle.
Christopher Warren is Associate Professor of English and Associate Department Head with a Courtesy Appointment in History at Carnegie Mellon University. Warren is the author of Literature and the Law of Nations, 1580-1680 (Oxford University Press, 2015), which was awarded the 2016 Roland H. Bainton Prize for Literature. He is a member of the MLA’s executive committee for 17th-Century English, and his articles have appeared in journals including Humanity, Law, Culture, and the Humanities, The European Journal of International Law, English Literary Renaissance, and Digital Humanities Quarterly. He is co-founder of the digital humanities project Six Degrees of Francis Bacon, and a founding member of CMU’s Center for Print, Networks, and Performance (CPNP). Warren also directs CMU’s minor in Humanities Analytics (HumAn) and is co-convenor of the Digital Humanities Faculty Research Group. Warren’s current research project focuses on “Freedom and the Press before Freedom of the Press,” using machine learning and artificial intelligence to discover and center the anonymous craftsmen and -women responsible for printing controversial clandestine materials.
Rini Bhattacharya Mehta is an Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and of Religion at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and an affiliate of National Center for Supercomputing Applications. Mehta works on the evolution and synthesis of modernity; nationalism, religious revival, cinema and the post-global nation state. Her book on Indian Cinema, Unruly Cinema: History, Politics, and Bollywood was published by University of Illinois Press in June 2020. She has published two co-edited anthologies: Bollywood and Globalization: Indian Popular Cinema, Nation, and Diaspora(Anthem Press, 2010) and Indian Partition in Literature and Films: History, Politics, Aesthetics (Routledge, 2014). One of the recipients of University of Illinois’s first Presidential Initiative to Celebrate the Impact of the Arts and the Humanities, she is currently leading a Digital Humanities Project on Global Film History. She is currently a LAS fellow in the second discipline (2021-2023), studying Computer Science.
