Project Team

 

Claudia Jünke (Principal Investigator) is professor of Spanish and French literatures and cultures at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. Her research is centred on modern and contemporary literatures and cultures in Europe and Latin America, with a focus on literary and cultural memory of violent pasts, narrative literature, intermediality and film. Among her latest publications is the book, co-edited with Désirée Schyns, Translating Memories of Violent Pasts. Memory Studies and Translation Studies in Dialogue, London: Routledge 2024. More information

 

Maja Klostermann (Doctoral researcher) studied French and History and holds a master’s degree in Teacher Education Studies from the University of Innsbruck. In her master’s thesis"‘[…] je souffre.’ La (di-)vision de la maladie et du corps dans Madame Bovary: plus qu’une rébellion corporelle ?", she examined the intersection of literature and medicine and focused on the representation of disease depicted as a form of non-verbal communication, expressed through both narrative clinical precision and metaphorical depth. More information

 

Andrea Linder (Doctoral researcher) holds a BA in Spanish and an MA in Romance Studies from the University of Innsbruck. In her master's thesis entiteld "Testimonio y  traducción. Se questo è un uomo de Primo Levi y su versión castellana Si esto es un hombre" she investgated the translational aspects of Primo Levi's memoir as well as the book's Spanish translation, against the backdrop of Holocaust memory in Spain. More information

 

Affiliated Researchers | International Collaborators

 

Vera Elisabeth Gerling is a professor of French and Spanish literature and literary translation at the University Heinrich Heine in Düsseldorf, Germany. Her research interests focus mainly on two areas: On the one hand cultural translation, cultural transfer and the connection between the theory and practice of translating literature (see Literaturübersetzen als Reflexion und Praxis. Tübingen: Narr, 2018, co-edited with Belén Santana). On the other hand, she examines literature and media with regard to the phenomenology and aesthetics of presence. This involves the possible relationships between text and the world, for example the ‘translation’ of violent pasts to textual documents. More information

 

Birgit Mertz-Baumgartner is a professor of French and Spanish literatures and cultures at the University of Innsbruck. In her research, she focusses on contemporary Francophone Literatures (France, Maghreb, Québec), on postcolonial theories and the relations between literature/art and history. In this field, she published (with Beate Burtscher-Bechter) Guerre d’Algérie, guerre d’indépendance. Regards littéraires croisés (2013). More information

 

Cecilia Rossi is professor of Literary Translation at the University of East Anglia, where she convenes the MA in Literary Translation and works for the British Centre for Literary Translation. Her latest translation, The Last Innocence and The Lost Adventures (Alejandra Pizarnik), published by Ugly Duckling Presse, was shortlisted for the National Translation Awards for Poetry (ALTA) in 2020. Her practice-led research focuses on the translation of post conflict literature, especially post dictatorship texts from the Southern Cone (Argentina-Chile). More information

 

Cornelia Ruhe is a professor of French and Spanish literature and media studies at the University of Mannheim, Germany. In her research, she mainly focuses on contemporary literatures, cultures and film in the Francophone and Hispanophone world, with a focus on the history of violence. Among her latest publications are the monograph La mémoire des conflits dans la littérature française contemporaine (Leiden/Boston: Brill/Rodopi 2020) and Le Labyrinthe littéraire de Mohamed Mbougar Sarr (co-edited with Sarah Burnautzki and Aboudlaye Imorou, Leiden/Boston: Brill/Rodop 2025). More information

 

Désirée Schyns is emerita associated professor Translation Studies and Francophone Literature at the University of Ghent (Belgium). In her research she focusses on the translation of multilingualism  in a postcolonial context, the translation of memory in francophone literature, on (the translation of) mémoire littéraire and on translated poetry. Among the publications in these areas are the monograph La mémoire littéraire de la guerre d'Algérie dans la fiction algérienne francophone (2012), Denken over poëzie en vertalen, de dichter Cees Nooteboom in vertaling (2018, co-edited with Philippe Noble) and Translating Memories of violent Pasts: Memory Studies and Translation Studies in Dialogue (2023, co-edited with Claudia Jünke). She is also a literary translator and translated works by (among others) M. Mokeddem, A. Djebar, M. Proust and H. Cixous into Dutch. More information

 

Arvi Sepp is a Professor of German Studies, Literary Studies, and Translation Studies at the Free University of Brussels (VUB) and Research Fellow at the Institute of Jewish Studies of the University of Antwerp. His research interests center on comparative literature, twentieth-century German (Jewish) literature, literary translation, migration and exile, multilingual literature. He received several awards for his research such as the Prix de la Fondation Auschwitz, the Prize for Research Communication of the Royal Flemish Society of Belgium for the Arts and Sciences, and the Theodor Frings Prize of the Sächsische Akademie der Wissenschaften. More information

 

Geir Uvsløkk is a translator and full professor of French literature and area studies at the University of Oslo, Norway, where he leads the research group “Cultural Memory Studies”. He has published on different aspects of French and francophone literature, culture and history, focusing on authors such as Genet, Bataille, Simon, Houellebecq, Modiano, Salvayre and Zeniter. His latest research mainly concerns the memory of the Spanish War, the Second World War and the Algerian War of Independence in contemporary French and francophone literature. Latest article: “Dans l’ombre de la guerre. Distances mémorielles dans Pas pleurer (2014) de Lydie Salvayre et L’Art de perdre (2017) d’Alice Zeniter” (Revue romane). More information