Kasia Szymanska

Prior to joining the Centre for Translation & Intercultural Studies at Manchester, Kasia was an assistant professor in the School of Languages, Literatures and Cultural Studies at Trinity College Dublin (2019-2022). She had also held a Junior Research Fellowship (postdoc) in Modern Languages at the University of Oxford (2016-2019), where she acted as co-convenor of the Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation research centre (2016-2019). She holds a DPhil in Modern Languages from the University of Oxford and an MPhil in European Literature and Culture from the University of Cambridge.

Kasia's research lies in literary translation, multilingual writing and comparative literature — especially with reference to the East European context. Her work to date has appeared in, among others, PMLA, Contemporary Literature, Slavic and East European Journal, the volume Prismatic Translation and other books on the intersection between translation, literature, and politics. She was recently named the 2022 Martha Cheung Award winner for the best English article in Translation Studies by an early career scholar. She is currently preparing her first book project Translation Multiples: From Global Culture to Post-Communist Democracy for publication in Princeton UP's series Translation/Transnation.

BA/MA - University of Warsaw

MPhil - University of Cambridge

DPhil - University of Oxford

Kasia's first project Translation Multiples: From Global Culture to Post-Communist Democracy (currently in preparation for PUP's Translation/Transnation) focused on a new genre of writing across English, Polish, German, and other languages; it discussed cultural and political ideas behind the gesture of multiplying different translation variants by the same translator or a group of translators.

She is currently working on three other projects. The first book project is provisionally entitled The Cold War Gaze: Dividing the Continent Through Text, Travel & Translation and will examine the recurring mechanisms of consolidating the Iron Curtain divide during the Cold War in a range of previously unexamined texts (e.g. popular travel guidebooks, materials promulgated by cultural institutions such as the British Council and the Congress for Cultural Freedom, travelogues to non-existent places beyond the Iron Curtain, publishing series, exoticised translations, and others).

The two other projects are edited volumes: one of them (co-edited with Joanna Trzeciak-Huss) is provisionally entitled The Tender Translator: Olga Tokarczuk Across Languages and collects essays exploring translations of Olga Tokarczuk across multiple languages. The other book in the making is The Bloomsbury Handbook to Modernism and Translation (co-edited with Rebecca Beasley).

Kasia was also one of the researchers involved in the AHRC/OWRI-funded project on Prismatic Jane Eyre as well as the Global Humanities Institute on Challenges of Translation.

2022 Martha Cheung Prize for the Best English Article in Translation Studies by an ECR

2021/2022 Enterprise Ireland (TCD)

2015 EST Translation Prize

2012-2016 Rawnsley Trust (Oxford)

2011 Corbridge Trust (Cambridge)

Translating for Creative and Heritage Industries

Research Methods in Translation and Intercultural Studies (convenor)

Tuesdays 3-4pm (office)

Thursdays 12-1pm (Zoom)

Email: kasia.szymanska@manchester.ac.uk