Centre for Translating Cultures
Housed in the Department of Languages, Cultures and Visual Studies (LCVS), the Centre for Translating Cultures organizes research seminars for scholars and students of Modern Languages and Cultures and runs events (talks, conferences, workshops, lectures and symposia) supporting their academic work. In the framework of our university’s overall strategy, the Centre aims at using the power of education and research to create a sustainable, healthy and socially just future. Our research seminars and events are mainly linked to the global languages and cultures studied in LCVS (French, German, Italian, Mandarin Chinese, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish) but we are interested in any language and culture and welcome contributions from, or about, them. All our activities are open to anyone across the university and the wider community. In 2024-2025 we will make a special effort to organize events that bring people together, from poetry readings to story-telling sessions in languages other than English.
Events
Events will generally take place on Wednesdays between 15:30 and 17:00.
Research seminar
Wednesday, January 22nd, LT6 Laver Building, 15:30-17:00
Main speaker: Prof. Monica Good (University of British Columbia, Okanagan)
Title: Maintaining and strengthening Maya cosmovision and cosmoperception
In this presentation, I will explore the significance of Maya cosmovision and cosmoperception—the ways in which Yucatec Maya people understand and situate themselves in the world. As an Indigenous scholar from Mexico working closely with Maya communities, I will discuss how Maya knowledge systems, rooted in a deep connection to the land, language, and community, shape our worldview and inform our identity. I will also reflect on the importance of Maya people expressing how we think and speak, emphasizing the role of language and cultural practices in maintaining and strengthening our identity in today’s Western-driven society. This talk will highlight why it is vital for Maya communities to continue asserting their ways of knowing and being, both as an act of cultural resilience and as a necessary response to the challenges posed by globalization and cultural assimilation.
Research seminar
Thursday 6th February, Room TBA, 15:30-17:00
Main speaker: Dr. Tom Stennett (University of Exeter)
Title: Writers in armed struggle in Angola and Mozambique
In 1959, Frantz Fanon theorized combat literature as works that incited an entire people to fight for national liberation. The armed Mozambican Marxist nationalist front, FRELIMO, appropriated Fanon’s discussion of combat literature in its proposal of poesia de combate (combat poetry), which its Angolan sister organization, the MPLA, would in turn appropriate. This presentation analyses the aesthetics of armed struggle that appears in the combat poetry published by FRELIMO during and after the armed liberation struggles against Portuguese colonialism. I read Mozambican combat poems and theorizations of combat poetry authored by Marxist FRELIMO intellectuals alongside the analyses of revolutionary armed struggle developed by FRELIMO’s first president Eduardo Mondlane and Bissau-Guinean and Cape Verdean revolutionary Amílcar Cabral. Furthermore, I situate the proposal of combat poetry as a vehicle for revolutionary ideology within the context of debates over the functions of ideology in the African Revolution. In this way, following Alexandra Reza’s (2024) approach to analysing négritude poetry, I read combat poems as sources of political theory that can help us to understand ideological debates amongst FRELIMO intellectuals relating to questions of political violence, political economy, class, and revolutionary commitment.
Research seminar
Wednesday, February 26, Room C417, Amory Building, 15:30-17:00
Main speaker: Carlotta Moro (University of Exeter) and Dr Catherine Evans (University of Exeter)
Title: Women Writing Philosophy in Early Modern Europe
Moro and Evans will present initial findings from their work on Cultures of Philosophy, examining women's philosophical work in seventeenth century England, Italy, and the Dutch republic’.
Research seminar
Wednesday, March 19, room TBA, time TBA
Details TBA
Find out more
Professor Luciano Parisi and Professor Muireann Maguire co-direct the Centre for Translating Cultures.
For all enquiries regarding centre activies in the 2024-25 academic year, please email Luciano.
For all enquiries regarding centre activies in the 2025-26 academic year, please email Muireann.