2006-2007 Theme:
TRANSLATION AND REPRESENTATION

Congratulations to these Faculty Fellows, who were named in the spring of 2006. They will present papers at the Fellows Conference on March 23, 2007. For more information about the Conference, click here!

Jeffrey Abt
Associate Professor, Art and Art History
Picturing Writing Pictures: From Representation to Translation in the Historiography of Egyptology

Anne Duggan
Associate Professor, Romance Languages & Literatures
The Tragic Story: An Exercise in Translation

Victor Figueroa
Assistant Professor, Romance Languages & Literatures
A Revolution by Any Other Name? Pan-Caribbean Representation of the Haitian Revolution

Mary Garrett
Associate Professor, Communication
&
Haiyong Liu
Assistant Professor, Near East and Asian Studies
The Translatable and the Translated between China and the US

Michael Goldfield
Professor, Political Science
Translation, Representation, and (Mis)Interpretation in Marx's Kapital

Suzanne Hilgendorf
Assistant Professor, German and Slavic Studies
English in the German Media: The Language's Impact in Television, Cinema/Film and Popular Music

Aaron Retish
Assistant Professor, History
Peasants In a Modern State: Power and Identity in Russia's Age of War and Revolution 1914-1921

Cannon Schmitt
Associate Professor, English
Victorian Oceans: Translation and Representations of an Atopia

James Thomas
Professor, Theatre
Translation of "The Wisdom of Rehearsal" by Russian director Anatoly Efros (1925 -1987)

Susan Vineberg
Associate Professor, Philosophy
Mathematical Representation in Empirical Science

Barrett Watten
Professor, English
Translating Authority: Adorno's Cultural Work in The Authoritarian Personality

EXPLICATION:
Throughout history, issues of "translation" and "representation" have been situated at the center of inquiries into the representational function of language, the means by which value is created and moral claims are expressed, definitions of the self and the other, the conceptualization of group and individual identity, the construction of power and power relations, and the expression of culture in general. This is evident when one considers how the representation of one-point-perspective in Renaissance painting affected the act of seeing, or how nineteenth-century translators used their renditions of Shakespeare's works to assert national identity. More recently, Herbert Paul Grice has explored the distinction between a speaker's meaning and linguistic meaning, and discussions of translation and representation have played a key role in the critical self-consciousness that informs Edward Said's "Orientalism," Homi Bhabha's notion of "hybridity," and Clifford and Marcus' notion of "writing culture."

This year's theme for the Humanities Center Faculty Fellows Competition seeks to address the multiple roles that translation and representation play in humanities scholarship and in artistic creations. The competition invites scholars in the humanities to address these challenges critically by exploring the nature, problems, and prospects of translation and representation. Such explorations may address translation, representation, or both, as well as interrelationships between the two. Proposals from any disciplinary perspective (including multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches) are welcome.

The types of questions that might be pursued within this thematic framework include:

• How have the problems of translation and representation been addressed in different historic periods and/or among different cultures?
  
• What are the various contexts within which acts of translation and representation occur and how does context affect their form?
  
• How does academia translate and represent specialized knowledge to the general public?
  
• How have processes of translation -- the translation from oral to written, the compilation of dictionaries, the invention of grammars, adaptations of drama to opera, novel to film, or "historically informed"
  performance to a "modern" setting -- functioned, for example, in processes of "civilization" and colonization?
  
• How do languages function? How do they represent thought, and how does thought represent the world?
  
• What is gained and what is lost in the process of translating from one language to another?
  
• What is the role of translation in processes of "othering"?
  
• To what extent and in what ways might the notion of translation apply to the problems of cross-cultural comparison and value judgment?
  
• Does "translation" assist in understanding attempts to transfer cultural values or even political systems (for example, democracy) from one society to another?
  
• What kinds of bridges does translation build between different cultures? How are differing viewpoints and frames of reference introduced to target audiences?
  
• How do new theories of intercultural study extend and deepen our understanding of translation and its practice?
  
• How are various meanings in human expression represented, translated, problematized and theorized?
  
• How do theories and practices of representation interact with and shape negotiations of individual, local and national identities in the present? How did they do so in the past?

The above questions are intended to be suggestive rather than exhaustive. The Humanities Center invites applications from scholars who are interested in the topics of translation and representation from any disciplinary or interdisciplinary perspective.