Florence Impens

Florence Impens is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the John Rylands Research Institute, and is affiliated with the Department of English, American Studies, and Creative Writing. Prior to her appointment at the University of Manchester in 2015, initially as a Research Associate, she worked as a NEH-Keough Fellow at the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies, University of Notre Dame (USA), and lectured in English and in French at Trinity College, Dublin (Ireland). 

She holds a PhD in English from Trinity College, Dublin, as well as MAs in French and in Irish Studies from Université Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3. 

Florence works on contemporary British and Irish poetry, with additional research interests in archives, translation and classical reception studies. 

She is currently working on a project funded by the Leverhulme Trust, entitled 'In their Own Words: Poetry in Translation in the UK after 1962'. This project examines aspects of the contemporary production and publication of poetry in translation in a British context. Extensively drawing from the Special Collections of the University of Manchester Library, it uses material from the Elaine Feinstein Papers and the Carcanet Press and Anvil Press Poetry archives to build case studies on the following topics:

• poetic translation as a creative process; translation as a collaborative process; the erasure of the collaborator in publication;
• the developments of lists of poetry in translation by small publishers in the UK - including editorial decisions, funding, and market;
• the political dimension of the dissemination of poetry in translation in the UK, whether in print or at festivals.

She is one of founding members of the Lives and Afterlives of Letters Network, an interdisciplinary research group based at Manchester and focused on the study and curation of correspondence.

Her first monograph, Classical Presences in Irish Poetry after 1960: The Answering Voice, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2018. She has also published essays and book chapters on contemporary Irish poets in Irish University Review, and with Cambridge and Oxford University Press.