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Meet the BCLT Research Group

Discover more about our BCLT Research Group members, their specialities and current projects

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Professor Cecilia Rossi

Research specialism: My research focuses on literary translation studies, literary translation as a creative writing practice and interdisciplinary boundaries between literary translation and creative writing. I am interested in exploring how creative writing can be used in literary translator training. My research is practice-led; in my research projects I aim to accomplish the dual tasks of training literary translators and furthering critical and theoretical enquiry through a reflection on the practice and process of translation. I am a member of the AHRC-funded Feminist Translation Network and also collaborate in the project “Remembering and Translating Violent Pasts” led by the University of Innsbruck: Remembering and Translating Violent Pasts. With the Argentine Association of Translators and Interpreters (AATI) and researchers at UNSAM (Universidad Nacional de San Martín, Argentina), I have been working since 2019 on the translation of works from Latin America’s indigenous and minoritized languages.

Current projects: I'm currently working on an AHRC Impact Acceleration Account project entitled "Literary Translation as a Creative Writing Practice in the context of Guaraní - Spanish to English translation". I have recently submitted my translation of Alejandra Pizarnik's The Paris Diaries to New Directions Publishing (New York) and will soon be working on the edits (forthcoming in April 2027 in the US and in the UK, with Fitzcarraldo Editions).

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Professor Duncan Large

Research specialism: History and theory of translation (especially translation and philosophy, computer-assisted literary translation); history of thought in Germany and France (especially Friedrich Nietzsche); comparative literature (especially Anglo-German literary relations).

Current projects: I am co-editor of two book series: Routledge Studies in Literary Translation and The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche (Stanford UP). I am currently completing a monograph on the German reception of Laurence Sterne, after which I will be co-translating the final volume of Nietzsche's Complete Works.

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Dr Tom Boll

Research specialism: My research interests include the theory and practice of translation; the Latin American, European and Anglo-American avant-garde; twentieth-century Spanish American fiction; contemporary poetry in Spanish and English; archives.

Current projects: I am currently working on a book about translators of Latin American fiction in the archive for Routledge.

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Jo Catling

Research specialism: Modern German literature, with a focus on W. G. Sebald; Rainer Maria Rilke; women's writing; literary translation.

Current projects: Having recently completed translations of W. G. Sebald's two books of critical essays on Austrian literature I am currently bringing together some of the strands of my research on Sebald in an invited paper for the conference "DisArchiving W. G. Sebald" at the University Bergamo, Italy, in November 2026.

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Dr Philip Wilson

Research specialism: Translation and Philosophy; the philosophy of Simone Weil; the Novel in New Area Studies; Wittgenstein; George Bernard Shaw.

Current projects: With Alice Leal (Wits) I am completing a monograph on the philosophy of translation, and with Susan Hodgett (UEA) I am completing a monograph on the novel in New Area Studies.

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Alana Stone Horn

Research specialism: Modern Japanese literature

Current projects: I'm currently writing my doctoral thesis on Abe Kobo's experimental fiction of the 1950s and 60s. My general research focusses on the analysis and translation of postwar Japanese avant-garde fiction and critical theory. I'm particularly interested in transmedial intersections between literature, visual art and philosophy, and what these reveal about modern Japanese subjectivity and ontology.

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Dr John-Mark Philo

Research specialism: As director of the Global Library project, John-Mark examines how people in the past and present day have travelled to and between libraries abroad, and what this means for the production and exchange of knowledge. From early-modern translations of Greek astronomy completed at the museum-cum-libraries of northern Italy, to contemporary adaptations of classical Farsi poetry undertaken today at Norwich’s Millennium Library, multilingualism and creative translation are at the heart of John-Mark’s research.

Current projects: Together with the Global Library Team, John-Mark delivers Library Access programmes across cities in Europe. Liaising with local NGOs, librarians, and people seeking asylum, these programmes deliver multilingual poetry and creative writing workshops, museum visits and local history tours, as well as archival close-ups designed to enable and support asylum-seekers and refugees to engage with the cultural offerings and information services in their new city. At the same time, Library Access promotes multilingualism in the library space itself, advocating for book stock in underrepresented languages and co-founding Sanctuary Archives in each of our partner libraries.

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Pierre Faugère

Research specialism: Philosophy of translation, translation of philosophy, post-structuralism, speculative realism. Working languages: French/English/German.

Current projects: Completion of a PhD thesis examining the interpretative challenges involved in translating Nick Land’s philosophical work into French.

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Clodagh F Kinsella

Research specialism: Experimental Translation, Transmimetic Texts (Fiction about Translation), 20th Century French Literature, Multilingual Literature, Hauntological Accounts of Translation, Translatorial Subjectivity, Ludic Literature, Translation Metaphors

Current projects: I am currently in the final year of a creative-critical PhD at UEA which explores what I am calling the 'third space of transgressive translation'. The critical component of the project considers transmimetic texts (by Lisa Robertson, Anne Carson, Cécile Wajsbrot and Christine Brooke-Rose) that depict translation as a creative and transgressive act that operates in a hauntological space ripe for play and re-coding; I also re-visit spatial metaphors in translation (e.g. translation as conduit), and draw out some new alternatives (fractal, ouroboros). The creative project is a mistranslation of André Breton's 'Nadja' (1928) that seeks to voice the silenced figure at the novel's heart (Léona Delcourt) while playing off the ludic potential of the translatorial 'I'.

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Dr Timothy Anderson

Research specialism: Poetry in English and German, and the translation of librettos (especially Richard Wagner's).

Current projects: I'm working on a history of alliteration in poetry. This looks into cultural history (philology, elocution, medicine) to work out how alliterative practices changed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

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Dr Kotryna Garanasvili

Research specialism: My research focuses on literary translation and interdisciplinary, creative approaches to it. I'm particularly interested in dialect translation and non-standard language, as well as translation-adjacent practice, and exophonic translation and writing.

Current projects: I'm currently working on a book on dialect translation, based on my PhD dissertation, as well as several research projects on translation-adjacent activities.

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Juana Adcock

Research specialism: Poetry Translation; Translingualism; Self-Translation; Creative Translation; Collaborative Translation; Tu'un Savi and Me'phaa Languages; Poetry in Indigenous Languages of Mexico.

Current projects: I translate in both directions between English and Spanish, and I study and work with the Me'phaa and Tu'un Savi languages of the western mountain region of Guerrero, Mexico. My current project is translating a poetry collection by Fernanda Kookuilo'o, working closely with the author and exploring creative approaches to presenting glosses and translators' notes, while critically engaging with the concepts of thick translation and expanded translation as alternative ways in which these works can be presented in English.

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Astrid Bell

Research specialism: Poetry and Self-Translation

Current projects: Self-Translation as Creative Practice: Rewriting Alterity, Alienation and Identity Across Languages

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Claire Demenez

Research specialism: I translate from Japanese into English. My research focusses on the relationship between disaster and literature and I work primarily with texts from the Taisho era (1920s). My current project deals with writings produced after the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, a disaster which destroyed over half of Tokyo. I look at texts written during and shortly after the disaster by writers who worked at different distances from the centre of power of modern Japanese literature; established 'literary' male writers, women writers, political activists and minority writers from colonised Korea, as well as foreign Western diplomats.

Current projects: I'm currently translating 'highbrow' magazine articles by high-profile male writers recounting their experiences of the 1923 earthquake. Parallel to this, I am also working on a translation of francophone diplomats' memoir writings about the disaster. All of them were written during the first few weeks after the disaster. I look at them comparatively for both how they narrate the events and the predictions for the future of Tokyo/Japan/literature that they present to their readers.

Jess Tipton

Research specialism: Previously Jessica completed a PhD on the topic of multilingualism in the Russian nobility (1750s-1850s) on a studentship attached to an AHRC-funded multidisciplinary project on the History of the French Language in Russia led by Derek Offord at the University of Bristol alongside teaching Russian translation and history to BA and MA students. As part of this project she published a chapter on code-switching in the volume French and Russian in Imperial Russia (Edinburgh University Press, 2015) and was awarded a medal ‘For services to Freedom and Enlightenment’ by the Moscow Dashkova Humanities Institute for research into the history of Russian interests in English landscape gardens. She completed her MA in Russian Studies from the School of Slavonic and East European Studies UCL where she published her thesis on Russia and climate change policy in the postgraduate Slovo journal. She holds an undergraduate degree in Russian with French from the University of Bristol, and has studied clarinet at the St Petersburg Conservatoire in Russia and the Royal Academy of Music in London.

Current projects: Jessica Tipton is a PhD Candidate at the University of East Anglia. Supported by the Ariadne Nicolaeff Scholarship, she is translating contemporary plays on ecofeminist themes from Russian into English. This topic neatly combines the twin interests of Russian studies and environmental policy that Jessica has pursued in her career and research to date.

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Harriet Truscott

Research specialism: I am a poet and translator, currently studying for a creative critical PhD at UEA, funded by a CHASE AHRC scholarship.

Current projects: My critical thesis addresses the role of the blank space of the page in twentieth-century poetry, examined through the movement of poems between countries, languages and publication formats. My critical work both shapes and is shaped by my creative project, a fragmented multilingual verse-novel that addresses questions of exilic literature, translation and textual silences.

Dr Eugenia Loffredo

Research specialism: My research interests include intersemiotic translation, with a particular focus on the intersections between creative writing, translation, and multimedia practices, and on translation as a dynamic, cross-media process that extends beyond linguistic transfer to encompass experiential, embodied, and ecological dimensions.

Current projects: My research interests include intersemiotic translation, with a particular focus on the intersections between creative writing, translation, and multimedia practices, and on translation as a dynamic, cross-media process that extends beyond linguistic transfer to encompass experiential, embodied, and ecological dimensions.

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Laura Zambianchi

Research specialism: My work centres on semiotics and multilingual meaning-making. I am interested in how texts shift across languages through translation, and how interpretation operates both in literary practice and in lived experience. I combine close reading, translation practice, and qualitative inquiry.

Current projects: I am currently translating Zinaida Gippius and Milán Füst, working comparatively across languages. Alongside this, I am developing research on multilingual experience and continuing practice-based projects in translation and documentary.

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Dr Hannah Osborne

Research specialism: My research focuses on modern and contemporary Japanese literature, with particular attention to the role of translation as a critical, pedagogical, and creative practice. Translation informs my work as a practitioner, as a lecturer concerned with the decolonisation of a literary canon shaped by Anglophone translation histories, and as a researcher interested in transnational dialogues between writers and artists. I am especially interested in the intersections between art and literature, and in the ways diverse artistic practices translate or transmediate into textual form. This includes a focus on the literary and political significance of such acts of translation and mediation. A further strand of my research examines representations of the body in literature, exploring how the body can be inscribed as an expansive text and how such corporeal textualities can resist hegemonic and normative gendered social roles and identities.

Current projects: I am currently a Japan Foundation Fellow at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto, where I am working on a monograph entitled The Intermedial Text: Kanai Mieko and the Surrealist Avant Garde. This project examines the intersections between Kanai’s early writing and the aesthetic and political strategies of the Japanese avant-garde of the 1960s, situating her work within broader debates around experimentation, intermedial practice, and gender. Alongside this, my second guest edited special issue, Decolonising Japanese Fictions, is scheduled for publication in Japan Forum in June 2026.

BCLT research group