MA Global Literatures and Cultures

Professor Muireann Maguire

Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature

Muireann Maguire is Professor in Russian and Comparative Literature at the University of Exeter. She is Principal Investigator on the ERC-funded Horizon 2020 project 'RusTRANS: The Dark Side of Translation: 20th and 21st Century Translation from Russian as a Political Phenomenon in the UK, Ireland, and the USA,' grant agreement no. 802437. This project, which is active until December 2023, explores the dynamics of Russian-English literary translation through a series of historical and/or contemporary case studies.

Professor Maguire's other research interests include gender studies, specifically the depiction of pregnancy, childbirth and breastfeeding in Russian and Western literature; her book Hideous Agonies: Myths of Maternity in Russian and Comparative Literature is in progress. In 2021-22, she is Principal Investigator on an AHRC Networking Grant, 'Salt Babies: Narrating Maternity in Russian and Comparative Literature'.

Dr Katie Brown

Senior Lecturer in Latin American Studies

Katie specializes in contemporary Latin American culture, with a particular focus on Venezuela. Her main research interests are the circulation of people (travel, migration and exile) and of texts (publishing, cultural policy and translation). She also researches and teaches about intermediality and cultural responses to politics in the 20th and 21st century. She runs venezuelanvoices.exeter.ac.uk

Dr Yue Zhuang

Senior Lecturer in Chinese, Art History and Visual Culture

With cross-cultural academic expertise in studies of the history of gardens and landscape art, Yue’s research areas straddle Chinese studies, art and architectural history, and visual culture. As a recipient of funding from EU Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions, Swiss National Foundation, and The Leverhulme Trust, she has led a series of research projects (Matteo Ripa’s Views of Jehol, 2011-13; Entangled Landscapes, 2013; Nature Entangled, 2014-18; and Cultivating Happiness, 2016-17) all exploring the cross-cultural dynamics between China and Europe at the intersections of gardens and landscape art, intellectual history, and the history of Sino-European exchange. She is the co-editor of Entangled Landscapes: Early Modern China and Europe (2017), a volume initiating a paradigm for research innovation in studies of the global history of gardens and landscape art. At present, she is implementing a new collaborative project ‘Cultivating one’s garden: Eastern and Western Perspectives.’

Professor Maria Scott

Associate Professor of French Literature and Thought

I am currently very interested in the notion that reading fiction can help to develop empathy, including Theory of Mind, in readers; I am exploring (and problematising) this idea from the perspective of (French) literary studies, looking at what literary fiction and literary theory have to say on the subject. My book Empathy and the Strangeness of Fiction: Readings in French Realism came out with Edinburgh University Press in April 2020.

My teaching and research tend to focus on 19th-century literature and culture. Many of my publications have focused on the work of the novelist Stendhal and the poet Charles Baudelaire, both of whom were also art critics. As the titles of my monographs suggest, I like to read works from unorthodox angles: Baudelaire's 'Le Spleen de Paris': Shifting Perspectives (Ashgate, 2005) and Stendhal's Less-Loved Heroines: Fiction, Freedom, and the Female (Legenda, 2013). The Baudelaire book won the Gapper Book Prize for the best monograph published in 2005 by a scholar working in the field of French studies and based in the UK or Ireland. The Stendhal book was published in French by Garnier in 2015.

Dr Wenqian Zhang

Lecturer in Chinese and Translation Studies

I obtained my PhD in the fields of Translation Studies and Chinese Studies from the University of Leeds in January 2020, and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Leeds Arts and Humanities Research Institute (March-August 2020). Prior to joining the University of Exeter in September 2022, I taught on the MA Chinese language programme and the MSc Translation Studies programme at the University of Edinburgh (2020-2022). 

Dr Yan Wen-Thornton

Senior Lecturer (E&S)

Dr Yan is the first PhD researcher, who studied the longitudinal study of Chinese women entrepreneurs that focused specifically on the Chinese governments three decades economic reform period from 1980s-2000s. Her research has made a significant contribution to women entrepreneurship and to discover how Chinese culture, government policy and massive domestic market demand have influenced and affected Chinese womens’ entrepreneurial identity and their motivation to start-up new companies. Furthermore, Dr Yan is interested in Gender, literature and Psychology studies, she was awarded a qualification in Psychology studies by Oxford University.

Professor Tom Hinton

Associate Professor of French Language and Literature

My research interests focus on medieval French and Occitan literature, especially of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, with an interest in manuscripts and the material context of medieval texts; currently I am working particularly on the French of medieval England. More broadly, I am interested in the reception of literature; the uses of the past; the representation of the unfamiliar; narrative aesthetics; and theories of translation.

I offer modules on medieval French and Occitan literature and culture, as well as co-teaching on wider survey modules at all levels (UG and PGT). I also teach French language. In 2017 I won the University of Exeter Student Guild award for Best Postgraduate Supervisor and in 2023 I was shortlisted in the Champion for Students category.

Professor Helena Taylor

Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature

My research focuses on the intellectual and literary history of early modern France, particularly the seventeenth century. I am interested in cultures of learning, women's varied intellectual practices and their reception, classical reception, cultural quarrels, and translation studies. 

My first book, published with OUP in 2017, examines the reception of the life of the ancient Roman poet Ovid in 17th-century French culture; my second book, Women Writing Antiquity: Gender and Learning in Early Modern France is forthcoming with OUP. I am currently leading a five-year project, Cultures of Philosophy: Women Writing Knowledge in Early Modern Europe, originally awarded as a European Research Council Horizon Europe Starting Grant and now funded by UKRI.

Dr Natalia Pinazza

Senior Lecturer in Portuguese Studies (Lusophone and Latin American Culture) (E&S)

I was awarded my BA in Languages and Literature at the University of São Paulo. I hold an Academic Excellence Awards funded MA with distinction in European Cinema and an Overseas Research Student Awards Scheme funded PhD (Globalisation and the National Imaginary in Contemporary Agentine and Brazilian Cinema) from the University of Bath. I worked at the Cultural Sector of UNESCO headquarters in Paris. In 2012, I was awarded the UNESCO Keizo Obuchi Fellowship to explore intercultural dialogue through visual arts at the University of Ottawa, Canada. I taught content and language modules at the University of Cambridge, University of Sheffield, Regent’s University and Birkbeck College, University of London. 

My research focuses primarily on journey narratives, film industry and issues of transnational cinema with a particular focus on Latin America and the Portuguese-speaking world.

Professor Michelle Bolduc

Professor in Translation Studies

Michelle Bolduc, Professor in Translation Studies at Exeter, is an internationally recognized scholar of Translation Studies and Comparative Medieval Literature (French, Occitan, and Italian), and has published extensively on medieval literature (translatio) as well as on modern rhetoric--the New Rhetoric Project--and its translation. Under the direction of Barbara K. Altmann and F. Regina Psaki, she took a PhD in Comparative Literature with a specialization in Medieval Literatures from the University of Oregon; she has held positions at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and the University of Arizona.

Author of Translation and the Rediscovery of Rhetoric (2020) and The Medieval Poetics of Contraries (2006), she has published extensively on medieval literature and rhetoric.

Dr Eliana Maestri

Senior Lecturer in Translation Studies

Dr Maestri graduated in Modern Languages and Literature (English and French) from the University of Parma, Italy (2000) and obtained her PhD in Translation Studies from the University of Bath (2012). She was a EUOSSIC Erasmus Mundus Post-Doctoral Fellow in European Studies at the Universities of Bath and Sydney, Australia (2011-2012). She was also the recipient of the 2014 MEEUC Research Fellowship at the University of Monash, Melbourne, working on Italian Australian second and third generations as 'self-translators'.

Dr Maestri’s research focuses on the interplay between translation, migration, mobility, gender, literature and visual culture. Australia has inspired her, informing her research and approach to translation.