Meet the Faculty

Eugene Ostashevsky
Clinical Professor
"Living my life in several languages has made me a translator and a “translingual” poet. My main interest is how languages do not match, because you can’t say quite the same things in another language, nor would you really want to. I therefore think of translation as a transformation, a metamorphosis."

Jennifer Zoble
Clinical Associate Professor
"What I most appreciate about translation is its inexhaustibility, both as a practice and as an academic subject. There’s always more to it–the questions it raises, the choices it presents, the effects it creates. Whether facilitating a class discussion, helping a student with their translation project, or working on a translation of my own, I always try to channel that sense of possibility."

Montana Marie Ray
Clinical Assistant Professor
"I like to think of translation as performing a piece of writing in a new language. To rehearse for this performance, I teach students to be rigorous researchers of a piece's context, close readers of its language, and vibrant creative writers."

Janet Hendrickson
Clinical Assistant Professor
"An emphasis on craft, practice, and place grows out of my work as a literary translator. I frame translation as an act of fabrication, moving away from a false problem of equivalency between languages or between word and thing."
Comparative Literature

Emily Apter
Silver Professor of French and Comparative Literature

Hala Halim
Associate Professor of Comparative Literature
"In various ways, translation is central to my work as a scholar and teacher. Involved for many years in translation (having rendered, among others, two Arabic novels into English), my teaching of translation studies combines both theory and practice. I have regularly offered courses on translation studies in relation to comparative literature and Arab cultures."

Zakir Paul
Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature
"My courses often include forays into translation understood as a repertoire of interpretive, expressive, and artistic techniques within and across languages and media. We attend to larger conceptual histories of how literary and philosophical forms emerge and travel in a global context, as well as the ways certain conceptual terms, syntactic orders, and idiomatic phrases resist being rendered in other languages."