Notes on Contributors

Dr. Dror Abend-David teaches at the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at the University of Florida. His first book was published in 2003 by Peter Lang under the title: “Scorned my Nation:” A Comparison of Translations of The Merchant of Venice into German, Hebrew, and Yiddish. His second book, Media and Translation: An Interdisciplinary Approach, was published in 2014 (soft cover 2016; reviewed in Delos 32) with Bloomsbury Academic Publishing. His third book, Representing Translation: Languages, Translation, and Translators in Contemporary Media, came out with Bloomsbury in January 2019 (reviewed in this issue). Dror has published articles on translation in relation to media, drama, literature, and Jewish culture. His email address is da2137@nyu.edu. He is a Delos board member and occasional contributor.

Edward Jordan Barger is a Philadelphia-based translator from Norwegian and French. He has worked in Norway at the Ivar Aasen Center in Ørsta. He has translated Sigbjørn Obstfelder’s 1894 novel The Cross.

Arno Bohlmeijer is a poet and novelist writing in English and Dutch, winner of the Charlotte Köhler Grant, runner-up for the 2018 Gabo Prize, finalist for the 2018 Poetry Matters Project, published in five countries. Notably, his poems were included in Universal Oneness: The Anthology of Magnum Opus Poems from around the World, 2019. Publishers Weekly commented on some of his previous work: “Relishing the subtle beauty. Life-affirming.”

He is the winner of a 2021 PEN America Grant to finish his novel for children.

Xisheng Chen, a Chinese American, is an ESL grammarian, lexicologist, linguist, translator and educator. His educational background includes: top scorer in the English subject in the National College Entrance Examination of Jiangsu Province, a BA and an MA from Fudan University, Shanghai, China (exempted from the National Graduate School Entrance Examination owing to excellent BA test scores), and a Mandarin Healthcare Interpreter Certificate from the City College of San Francisco, CA, USA. His working history includes: translator for Shanghai TV Station, Evening English News, Lecturer at Jiangnan University, Wuxi, China, Adjunct Professor at the Departments of English and Social Sciences of Trine University (formerly Tri-State University), Angola, Indiana, notary public, and contract high-tech translator for Futurewei Technologies, Inc. in Santa Clara, California, USA. As a translator for over three decades, he has published a lot of translations in various fields in newspapers and journals in China and abroad. A set of three poems co-translated by him and Chen Du was a finalist in the 2020 Gabo Prize for Literature in Translation & Multilingual Texts.

Cynthia L. Chennault is an associate professor emerita of Chinese language and literature at the University of Florida. She researches the poetry and social history of the Six Dynasties (220–589). A recent publication is the chapter on poetry for the Cambridge History of China’s volume about that period. She was guest editor for a Delos issue on Chinese poetry (vol. 10, nos. 1–2; 1997).

Stanley Corngold is professor emeritus of German and comparative literature at Princeton University and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has published widely on modern German writers (e.g., Dilthey, Nietzsche, Musil, Kraus, Mann, Benjamin, Adorno, among others) but for the most part has been translating and writing on the work of Franz Kafka. Having completed an intellectual biography of the philosopher Walter Kaufmann (reviewed in Delos 34.1), he will now publish a book at Princeton in 2022, titled The Mind in Exile: Thomas Mann in Princeton.

Chen Du is a voting member of the American Translators Association and a member of the Translators Association of China. She holds an MS in biophysics from Roswell Park Cancer Institute (SUNY at Buffalo) and a Master’s Degree in radio physics from the Chinese Academy of Sciences. She revised more than eight chapters of the Chinese translation of the biography of Helen Snow, Helen Foster Snow: An American Woman in Revolutionary China. In the United States, her translations have appeared in Columbia Journal, Lunch Ticket, Pilgrimage, The Los Angeles Review. She has published an essay in The Dead Mule and her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Levitate, American Writers Review, and elsewhere; her poetry chapbook was published by The Dead Mule online. A set of three poems co-translated by her and Xisheng Chen was a finalist in the 2020 Gabo Prize for Literature in Translation & Multilingual Texts. She is also the author of the book Successful Personal Statements. Find her online at ofsea.com.

Janet J. Graham earned her PhD in English from the University of Hawaii at Manoa after defending her dissertation analyzing Vietnamese diasporic literature through the frameworks of critical refugee studies and relationality in the fall of 2019. While completing her dissertation, she served as reviews editor for Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly. She is an assistant professor in the English department at the University of Nebraska at Kearney.

Alexis Levitin has published forty-seven books in translation, mostly poetry from Portugal, Brazil, and Ecuador. In addition to Astrid Cabral’s Cage (Host Publications, 2008), his translations from Brazil include five books by Salgado Maranhão, as well as Clarice Lispector’s Soulstorm (New Directions, 1989). Translations from Portugal include eleven collections of poetry by Eugenio de Andrade and Rosa Alice Branco’s Cattle of the Lord (Milkweed Editions, 2016). Poetry from Ecuador is represented by Ana Minga’s Tobacco Dogs (Bitter Oleander Press, 2013), Santiago Vizcaino’s Destruction in the Afternoon (Dialogos Books, 2015), and Carmen Váscones’ Outrage (White Dwarf Editions, 2018). He has served as a Fulbright Lecturer at the Universities of Oporto and Coimbra, Portugal, The Catholic University in Guayaquil, Ecuador, and the Federal University of Santa Catarina, in Brazil and has held translation residencies at Banff, Canada, Straelen, Germany (twice), and the Rockefeller Foundation Study Center in Bellagio, Italy. He is the founder of the bilingual reading sessions at the annual conference of the American Literary Translators Association.

Sharon Fish Mooney is the author of Bending Toward Heaven: Poems After the Art of Vincent van Gogh (Wipf and Stock/Resource Publications, 2016) and editor of A Rustling and Waking Within (OPA Press, 2017), an anthology of ekphrastic poetry on art located in Ohio museums. She won the inaugural Frost Farm Prize for metrical poetry. Sharon has lectured on Van Gogh and poet Gerard Manley Hopkins and has read her poetry in university venues in the United States, Canada, France, and the Netherlands. Her poems have appeared in various journals including Rattle, RUMINATE, First Things, Modern Age, The Lyric, The Lost Country, String Poet, The Ekphrastic Review, The Evansville Review and two art museum anthologies. Her translations of French have been published in Transference and Common Threads. Sharon was awarded an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award (2018) to focus on ekphrastic poetry and translations. She teaches nursing courses online for Regis University, Denver, Colorado and Indiana Wesleyan. Her PhD is from the University of Rochester.

Wendy Pfeffer is emerita professor of French at the University of Louisville and a visiting scholar in Romance Languages at the University of Pennsylvania. Her several books and numerous articles have discussed different genres and aspects of medieval French and Occitan literature. Her most recent book, Le festin du troubadour: Nourriture, société et littérature en Occitanie (1100–1500), considers the culinary culture of medieval southern France and the literary uses of food vocabulary; this work was supported by a Fulbright grant to France (2011). She has also published on Renaissance, modern, and contemporary Occitan literature and culture. Her current research is on Renaissance physician Jean Bruyérin-Champier and his culinary interests, work funded by a second Fulbright grant to France (2018), as well as medieval culinary history. She has been recognized by the French government as an officier in the Order of Arts and Letters.

G. J. Racz is professor of English, philosophy and languages at LIU Brooklyn, review editor for Translation Review, and a former president of the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA). His translations of plays by Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Félix Lope de Vega, Miguel Cervantes, and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz appeared in The Golden Age of Spanish Drama: A Norton Critical Edition (2018).

Emrah Sahin (PhD McGill University) is a transnational historian focusing on the intersection of political forces and social exchanges within and beyond national borders. He is the author of Faithful Encounters: Authorities and American Missionaries in the Ottoman Empire (2018). As the University of Florida’s Global Fellow (2021), he started a new major project that charts a recent massacre in a remote Kurdish village. He is also writing a critical manuscript about six travelers who told Muslims about Europe and America. Sahin is a senior lecturer at the University of Florida’s Center for European Studies, where he is teaching Turkish language, history, and culture.

Olivia Santovetti is associate professor in Italian at the University of Leeds. Her main fields of research are the theory of the novel, narratology, and the history of reading. She has published on Elena Ferrante, Calvino, Gadda, Pirandello, De Roberto, Neera, Dossi, Tarchetti and on the reception of Laurence Sterne in Italy (she edited and translated a selection of his Sermons for Signorelli). She has published the book Digression: A Narrative Strategy in the Italian Novel (2007) and edited the special issue of The Italianist, Self-reflection in Italian Literature (2015). Her current research investigates the representation of reading and readers in the nineteenth-century Italian novel; her project, “The woman reader in Italian literature and visual arts in the fin de siècle period,” was funded by the British Academy.

R. Allen Shoaf, Alumni Professor of English, emeritus, at the University of Florida, is the author of more than a dozen books and nearly 100 papers and reviews, twice a holder of fellowships of the National Endowment for the Humanities, founding editor of the prize-winning journal Exemplaria: A Journal of Theory in Medieval and Renaissance Studies, which he edited from 1987 until 2008, and the winner of six teaching awards during his career at UF, including “University-wide Teacher of the Year” in 1992. He has been concerned with problems of translation throughout his academic career, as can be seen, for example, in his 1990 essay, “Literary Theory, Medieval Studies, and the Crisis of Difference.” He is the author also of several books of poetry, most recently Language to Live In (2019). He maintains a website at alshoaf.com where he regularly posts new poems.

Janna Tamargo is a graduate student in sociology at the University of Florida and study coordinator for a research project gathering perspectives on authenticity and gender in gastronomical experiences. She has spent the last three years researching authentic food in Istanbul, Turkey, and ethnic-themed restaurants in the United States. Janna fell in love with language in her teens after she was an exchange student in France during high school. She has traveled to over thirty countries and speaks some of five languages. Currently, she splits her time between Florida and Turkey. She is also the current president of the Florida Society of the Social Sciences. Her research interests include the sociology of food, authenticity, and ethnicity in food culture.

Sergey Tyulenev is the director of the MA in translation studies at the School of Modern Languages and Cultures, Durham University, UK. He holds a PhD in linguistics (2000, Moscow State University) and a PhD in translation studies (2009, University of Ottawa). His primary academic interest is translation as a social activity. He is the author of six books on translation, the most recent being Translation in the Public Sphere (Palgrave, 2018).

Patricia Worth is a literary translator with a Master of Translation Studies. Her published translations include George Sand’s novel, Spiridion (2015), two bilingual books of New Caledonian stories by Claudine Jacques (2017, 2018), a small collection by Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé, Winter Tales (2018), and a translation of Jean Lorrain’s Stories to Read by Candlelight (2019). Several translated stories have appeared in journals in Australia, New Caledonia and the U.S., including Bewildering Stories, Sunspot Lit, Delos, and The AALITRA Review. Patricia writes about her translations at patriciaworthtranslator.com.