Steering Comittee
Jan Ceuppens (Director)
Jan Ceuppens is assistant professor at KU Leuven, where he teaches German literature, translation, and interpreting. His research interests include modern and contemporary German literature, translation and reception studies. He has published a monograph on W.G. Sebald (Vorbildhafte Trauer. W.G. Sebalds Die Ausgewanderten und die Rhetorik der Restitution (Eggingen: Isele 2010)) as well as articles on Kafka and Hölderlin and on the interaction between Dutch and German literatures in the 19th and early 20th century. He has translated texts by Mariča Bodrožič, Silke Scheuermann, Thomas Meinecke and Kathrin Röggla.
Jack McMartin
Jack McMartin is assistant professor of translation studies and intercultural transfer at KU Leuven. He is also a practicing Dutch-English translator. His current research investigates the production and reception of Dutch literature in translation, focusing on the people, institutions, and spaces that shape the global book market. He is co-editor (with Jan Van Coillie) of Children’s Literature in Translation: Texts and Contexts (Leuven University Press, 2020), winner of the IRSCL Edited Book Award 2021. Jack has also published (with Elke Brems) on the life and work of the American-Dutch translator, translation theorist and poet James Holmes. Jack is a board member of the CETRA – Centre for Translation Studies and is assistant editor of the John Benjamins journal Translation in Society. Jack currently coordinates the ‘Circulation of Science News in the COVID-19 era’ research project (2021–2025), which examines translational practices in global science news flows. With Paola Gentile, he is lead coordinator of ‘Binnenlandse vogels, buitenlandse nesten’ (2020–2022), an international research consortium of Dutch Studies scholars and translation researchers examining the connections between cultural policy and the international circulation of Dutch literature.
Affiliation: KU Leuven
Contact: jack.mcmartin@kuleuven.be
Publications
Tom Toremans
Tom Toremans is assistant professor at KU Leuven, where he teaches English, Scottish and European literature, and literary theory. His research interests include British Romanticism, Scottish literature, periodical studies, and translation and reception studies. He is a member of the steering committee of the Centre for Translation Studies (CETRA) and of the executive board of the Reception Studies Society. He is also a member of the editorial board of the journal Reception: Texts, Readers, Audiences, History. More details on publications and current research projects under his supervision can be found on his personal website.
Elke Brems
Elke Brems is associate professor (‘hoofddocent’) at the Faculty of Arts KU Leuven. She is the head of the Research Unit of Translation Studies at KU Leuven. Her research interests include Dutch literature, Reception Studies and Translation Studies. She has published on contemporary Dutch poetry, literature and poetics during the interwar period, the relation between Dutch culture and other cultures, cultural identity and literature. She is a member of the Board of CETRA (Centre for Translation Studies). She is also a member of the editorial boards of Zacht Lawijd and of Poeziekrant.
Timothy Sirjacobs
Timothy Sirjacobs studied French, German and Dutch literature at the Free University of Brussels (VUB) and at the Heinrich Heine Universität (HHU). After graduating a second master in educational sciences, he is now currently working as a PhD student at KULeuven under the joint supervision of Elke Brems, Reine Meylaerts, and Stéphanie Vanasten (co-supervisor). As part of the BELTRANS-project (KU Leuven, UCLouvain and KBR), he is exploring intra-Belgian translation flows between 1970 and 2020.
Members
Nasrin Ashrafi
Nasrin Ashrafi, is FWO postdoctoral fellow at Translation and intercultural Transfer research Unit, KU Leuven. Her areas of research interest are sociology of translation, cultural studies, feminism, and interdisciplinary approaches extending the boundaries of Translation Studies as an academic discipline. Fueled by her research, she draws on a broad ontological and methodological aspects of Relational thinking with an eye for sociologically relevant issues in the realm of Translation Studies.
Affiliation: KU Leuven
Contact: nasrin.ashrafi@kuleuven.be
Marialena Avgerinou
Marialena Avgerinou is a PhD candidate in Translation Studies at KU Leuven, with the ERC Starting Grant COLLAB project on literature and migration led by Núria Codina. Her research stands at the junction of decolonial theory and translation and literary studies, utilizing field research methods from anthropology. It will be focused on small-scale cultural CSOs in the UK and Belgium that facilitate community-led literary activities, considering them from a dual perspective—as both literary and political projects. She studied History and Philosophy (University of Dundee) and Comparative Law (IUC-University of Turin) and before this academic position she worked as an EFL teacher and English<>Greek and Italian>English translator. Her broader interests include marxist feminism, process philosophy, and multilingualism.
Affiliation: KU Leuven
Contact: marialena.avgerinou@kuleuven.be
Ulrike Burki
Ulrike Burki holds a master’s degree in Dutch and German culture and literature (UAntwerpen & UU). Her research interests lie in the literary history of the Flemish movement and the construction and in the circulation of national images through literary texts. Currently, she is working under the supervision of Kevin Absillis (University of Antwerp) and Elke Brems (KU Leuven) on a FWO-project about the representation of Flanders in German translations of Flemish literature that appeared during World War I.
Affiliation: UAntwerpen
Contact: Ulrike.Burki@uantwerpen.be
Gandolfo Cascio
Gandolfo Cascio is assistant professor of Italian literature and translation studies at Utrecht University, where he is also carrying out the Observatory on Dante Studies project. His research focuses on the legacy and readership of canonical authors and their mutual influences, particularly stylistic ones.
He authored Michelangelo in Parnaso. La ricezione delle «Rime» tra gli scrittori (Marsilio, 2019; English translation: Michelangelo on Parnassus. The Reception of the Poems Among Writers, Brill, 2022), Le ore del meriggio. Saggi critici (Il Convivio, 2020; Giuseppe Antonio Borgese Prize) and Dolci detti. Dante, la letteratura e i poeti (Marsilio, 2021; Nino Martoglio Prize).
He is the editor of the series Literary Reception & Art Reception and serves on the boards of various journals and societies.
Affiliation: Universiteit Utrecht
Contact: g.cascio@uu.nl
Publications
Laura Cernat
Laura Cernat is a PhD student at KU Leuven (Belgium), working on an FWO project, under the supervision of Ortwin de Graef (KU Leuven) and Mircea Martin (University of Bucharest). Her research focuses on the specificity of writer-based biofiction, discerned through the analysis of biographical, autobiographical, personal, and artistic documents about the writers portrayed in a set of recent biographical novels. She has attended several international conferences, where she presented work on Virginia Woolf, Henry James, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Vladimir Nabokov as reflected in biofiction. She has published on the degrees of fictionalization in Woolf-inspired biofiction in the edited collection Virginia Woolf and Heritage (Clemson University Press, 2017) and has contributed chapters about biofiction to the forthcoming volumes Theory in the “Post” Era (Bloomsbury) and Author, Authorship, and Authority in the Age of Cultural Studies and New Media (UCL Press).
Anna Sofia Churchill
Anna Sofia Churchill is a PhD candidate on the ERC Starting Grant project “COLLAB: Making Migrant Voices Heard through Literature. How Collaboration Is Changing the Cultural Field” (2023-2028)” at the department of Translation Studies, KU Leuven. Focusing on single-authored texts that emerge from encounters with migrants centred around the genres of anthology and short story collections, her PhD reflects critically on the act of literary mediation to better understand the thematic and aesthetic features of collaborative writing in contexts of migration. Prior to joining the COLLAB team, she obtained an MA in English Linguistics and Literature with Summa cum laude also at KU Leuven, submitting a thesis under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Benedikt Szmrecsanyi (KU Leuven). Her bachelor MA (Hons) was in English Literature and Italian from the University of Edinburgh. Academic research interests include comparative literature, English literature, migration and refugee literature, translation studies, multilingualism, language policy, minority languages, and interdisciplinary approaches to migration.
Aside from academic study and pursuits, Anna Sofia is a trained opera singer (MMus in Vocal Performance, Royal Conservatoire of Scotland) and worked professionally in the classical music industry in the UK, France, and USA on numerous young artist programmes (Britten-Pears Young Artist; Royaumont Young Artist, etc) and in international competitions (semi-finalist Concours Corneille, etc). She also worked for the British Refugee Council as a project leader and as a CELTA qualified (International House London; University of Cambridge) TEFL teacher.
Ernest De Clerck
Ernest De Clerck (1993) is a doctor of English Literature. His PhD-project (2017-2021) was called ‘The Reception and Translation of Foreign Literatures in British Romantic Magazines’ and was supervised by Tom Toremans (KU Leuven) and Frederik Van Dam (Radboud University). De Clerck’s research domains are periodical studies, translation studies, and Romanticism. His work focalises on literary magazines of the 1810s and the 1820s, and more particularly on the instances of cultural transfer in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, the London Magazine, the New Monthly Magazine, and the Liberal. By combining a quantitative and qualitative reading of a neglected corpus his research attempts to recalibrate conceptions of nineteenth-century British literature from mostly insular or self-sufficient, to a more accurate image of a cross-cultural complex which places cultural transfer at the heart of a European Romanticism.
Lara Delchambre
Lara Delchambre (2000) studied Literature and Linguistics (English – Spanish) at KU Leuven. She holds a Master’s degree in Western Literature and an advanced Master’s degree in Iberian and Ibero-American Studies. After graduating in 2023, she started working on a PhD project under the supervision of Erwin Snauwaert. This project analyses transnationalism and intercultural transfer in Peruvian Literature. More specifically, the research looks at the relationship between imagology, transnationalism and processes of translation in order to determine certain dynamics within the global intercultural dialogue.
Affiliation: KU Leuven
Contact: lara.delchambre@kuleuven.be
Rachelle Gloudemans
Rachelle Gloudemans has obtained a Master’s degree in Italian literature and culture (2017) and has completed a Research Master in Literary Studies (2018) at the University of Amsterdam. She also holds a BA in Italian Studies (2015) and in European Studies (2015). She is currently working on a PhD project on translingualism in the works of Jewish-Italian authors, under the supervision of dr. Natalie Dupré (KU Leuven). The project borrows concepts from Translation Studies and studies on World Literature to explore how multilingual authors, born outside Italy, use the Italian language to interrogate the complicated relationships between languages, territoriality and Jewish identity in their works. Her research interests include transnational literatures, transmediality and cultural memory.
Affiliation: KU Leuven
Contact: rachelle.gloudemans@kuleuven.be
Publications
Ewoud Goethals
Ewoud Goethals (1995) studied Literature and Linguistics Dutch-English. In addition, he holds advanced master degrees in Literary Studies and Digital Humanities. Before joining CERES he worked as a catalographer at the legal deposit of the Royal Library of Belgium (KBR). Currently he is a PhD student at KU Leuven in the research group of translation and intercultural transfer (VICT) under the supervision of Elke Brems, Reine Meylaerts, and Stéphanie Vanasten (co-supervisor). He is affiliated to BELTRANS, a federal project by KU Leuven, UCLouvain and KBR about intra-Belgian literary translations 1970-2020.
Affiliation: KU Leuven
Contact: ewoud.goethals@kuleuven.be
Besa Hashani
Elisa Nelissen
Elisa Nelissen is a PhD researcher under the supervision of Jack McMartin, Michaël Opgenhaffen and Luc van Doorslaer, working on the interdisciplinary project “The Circulation of Science News in the Coronavirus Era” in collaboration with the KU Leuven Institute for Media Studies. Her research focuses, among others, on how science news about COVID-19 vaccines travels from the lab to Flemish newspapers, and the translations and modifications it is subject to. Previously, Elisa worked as a press officer at Elsevier and KU Leuven and as a freelance (science) writer and editor. She obtained a BA in Applied Linguistics (English/Spanish) at KU Leuven, an MA in Book and Digital Media Studies at Leiden University and a postgraduate degree in international investigative journalism at Thomas More.
Contact: elisa.nelissen@kuleuven.be or @elisanelissen
Carmen Reisinger
After completing her MA in Comparative Literature at the University of Vienna, Carmen Reisinger was appointed at the department of English Literature at KU Leuven. Her PhD project is supervised by Prof. Dr. Raphaël Ingelbien (KU Leuven) and part of the larger project ‘Bringing the Bard Back Home? The English Translation of Foreign Shakespeare Criticism in the Long 19th Century’. Her dissertation focuses on the British translation of German critical works on Shakespeare, which formed an important part of the intellectual transfer between German-speaking and British literary scholars. Her monograph ‘Schachzüge im translatorischen Feld. Zur Rezeption von Alejo Carpentier im deutschsprachigen Verlagswesen’ was published in 2021.
Affiliation: KU Leuven
Contact: carmen.reisinger@kuleuven.be
Joana Roqué Pesquer
Joana Roqué Pesquer is a PhD candidate on the COLLAB project at the Department of Translation Studies, KU Leuven. Her PhD focuses on the impact of the sharing economy on new publication and dissemination practices led by migrants, analysing collaboration as an alternative economic model consisting in peer-to-peer support and digital networking. She holds a BA in Liberal Arts from the Autonomous University in Barcelona (UAB) and was awarded the Voltaire Foundation bursary to undertake an MSc in Digital Scholarship from the University of Oxford, where she also trained as an intern in the Bodleian Special Collections and the CERL Provenance Digital Archive. She spent her final year of undergrad at Sorbonne Université, studying literature, sociology and aesthetics. Her key areas of interest include sociocultural and material history of books, postcolonial digital humanities, democratic and sovereign digitalization, as well as crowdfunding and self-organized publishing presses in contexts of migration. Outside of academia, she is passionate about dance theory and practice, and is learning how to make books from scratch by using a combination of early modern and contemporary printmaking techniques.
Sonja Ruud
Sonja Faaren Ruud is a postdoctoral researcher with the ERC Starting Grant project “COLLAB: Making Migrant Voices Heard through Literature. How Collaboration Is Changing the Cultural Field” where she researches migrant writing workshops coordinated by European civil society organizations as social, political, and literary projects. Sonja has a PhD in Anthropology in Sociology from the Geneva Graduate Institute, where her dissertation explored questions of value and devaluation vis-à-vis Luxembourg’s transition to fare-free public transportation. Her research areas include mobilities (in multiple forms), state- and nationhood, and the anthropology of work.
Affiliation: KU Leuven
Contact: sonjafaaren.ruud@kuleuven.be
Merel Waeyaert
Merel Waeyaert is a PhD candidate at the department of Literary Studies of KU Leuven. They obtained a Master’s degree in Historical Languages and Literature (2021) from Ghent University. During their studies they worked as a volunteer writing mentor and teaching assistant for the English Linguistics department of Ghent University. They have worked as an intern for the research group GEMS (Group for Early Modern Studies) at Ghent University, and for the Flanders Heritage Library. Merel is currently working on the project “Found in Translation: Translators and the Construction of Literary Authority in the 18th-Century Low Countries”, under the supervision of Beatrijs Vanacker (KU Leuven) and Lieke van Deinsen (KU Leuven). The aims of this project are the reappreciation of translations within the literary landscape of the Southern and Northern Netherlands, and the examination of the performativity of authorship and authority in the eighteenth century.
Affiliation: KU Leuven
Contact: merel.waeyaert@kuleuven.be
Pieter Boulogne
Pieter Boulogne (1982), PhD in Slavonic Studies, is an assistant professor of Russian literature at KU Leuven and a visiting professor of Slavonic Studies at Ghent University. Since 2017, he is a board member of the KU Leuven Centre for Translation Studies (CETRA). His main research interests lie at the crossroads of history of Russian literature, descriptive translation studies and imagology. In 2011, he published a slightly overweight dissertation in Dutch on the early Dutch critical reception and (mostly indirect) translations of Dostoevsky, under the title Het temmen van de Scyth. De vroege Nederlandse receptie van F.M. Dostoevskij (Taming the Scythian. The Early Dutch Reception of F.M. Dostoevsky). More recently, he contributed to CODL: an international network studying the circulation of Dutch literature. Once in a blue moon, he indulges in literary translation from Russian and literary criticism.
Affiliation: KU Leuven
Contact: pieter.boulogne@kuleuven.be
Publications
Personal Website
Núria Codina
Núria Codina Solà is a postdoctoral fellow at KU Leuven and the Principal Investigator of the ERC Starting Grant project “Making Migrant Voices Heard through Literature: How Collaboration Is Changing the Cultural Field” (COLLAB, 2023-2028), which looks at a wide array of collaborative practices across Europe that create spaces for literary participation of migrants. Her previous research projects centered around the role of multilingualism and refugee writing in contemporary world literature and were funded by the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO). Núria received a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Tübingen and is the author of Verflochtene Welten. Transkulturalität in den Werken von Najat El Hachmi, Pius Alibek, Emine Sevgi Özdamar und Feridun Zaimoglu (2018). She has also published in journals such as Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Research in African Literatures, and Textual Practice. Her research interests include literary multilingualism, transnational literature, collaborative writing, postcolonialism, translation theory, cultural studies and interdisciplinary approaches to migration.
Affiliation: KU Leuven
Contact: nuria.codina@kuleuven.be
Publications
Ben De Witte
Ben De Witte (PhD Rutgers University) teaches comparative criticism, world literature studies and translation at KU Leuven campus Leuven. His research interest are in literary translation and in comparative approaches to the study of modernism, in particular in the area of drama and performance, and gender and sexuality. Ben has published research in Modern Drama, Cahier voor Literatuurwetenschap, Theatre Research International, and Vooys, and has written book and performance reviews for TTR, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, and Theatre Journal. He recently co-translated (with João Nemi Neto) João Silvério Trevisan’s novel Em nome do desejo for Columbia University’s Sundial House: Latin American and Iberian Literature in Translation.
Affiliation: KU Leuven
Contact: ben.dewitte@kuleuven.be
Publications
Reine Meylaerts
Reine Meylaerts is Professor of Comparative Literature and Translation Studies at KU Leuven where she teaches courses on European Literature, Comparative Literature and Translation and Plurilingualism in Literature. She was director of CETRA (Centre for Translation Studies) from 2006-2014 and is now board member. Her current research interests concern translation policy, intercultural mediation and transfer in multilingual cultures, past and present. She is the author of numerous articles and chapters on these topics. She is also review editor of Target. International Journal of Translation Studies. She was coordinator of 2011-2014: FP7-PEOPLE-2010-ITN: TIME: Translation Research Training: An integrated and intersectoral model for Europe. She is former Secretary General (2004-2007) of the European Society for Translation Studies (EST) and Chair of the Doctoral Studies Committee of EST.
Affiliation: KU Leuven
Contact: reine.meylaerts@kuleuven.be
Publications
Francis Mus
Francis Mus is Assistant Professor of French and Translation Studies in the Department of Translation, Interpreting and Communication at the University of Ghent. His research interests include literary translation studies (Francophone literatures; literature(s) in Belgium; translation from French to Dutch); translation and music (Leonard Cohen, popular music, classical music); translation and multimodality; translation and visibility (ethics of translation); literary multilingualism in/and translation.
His monograph The Demons of Leonard Cohen (2020) was awarded the Literary Prize of the Province of East Flanders and was a finalist for the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards. He also serves on the editorial board of JoSTrans and the scientific committee of the Book Series ‘Truchements’ (University of Liège).
Affiliation: UGent
Contact: francis.mus@ugent.be
Publications
Erwin Snauwaert
Beatrijs Vanacker
Beatrijs Vanacker is an FWO postdoctoral fellow at KU Leuven, where she teaches courses on French and comparative literature and literary translation. Her research interests include early modern prose fiction (focus on 18th century), mostly from a transcultural perspective, pseudotranslation and network analysis of (women) writers’ correspondences. She has been a visiting fellow at LMU München, Augsburg University and McGill University and has published on literary translation, (transcultural) poetics of the novel and women writers’ networks. She is a member of the executive board of the Dutch-Belgian Society for Eighteenth Century Studies and assistant editor of the online journal Interférences littéraires / Literaire interferenties.
Affiliation: KU Leuven
Contact: beatrijs.vanacker@kuleuven.be
Publications
Jan Van Coillie
receptionstudies.be 