Fourth Annual Postgraduate Conference, 2020

Published: 20 December 2020

On May 13th, the SMLC held its fourth highly-successful annual PG Conference in Translation Studies and Comparative Literature on the topic of ‘Fluidity’.

This year's conference was led by PhD researchers Charlotte Le Bervet and Lucy McCormick, and Dr Shanti Graheli and Dr Henriette Partzsch from the Writing in Transit research cluster. This year, Dr Georgina Collins and Professor Roberto A. Valdeón were the distinguished keynote speakers, and Dr César Domínguez and Professor Susan Bassnett also joined us for a closing roundtable.

The Fluidity conference explored how Comparative Literature and Translation Studies analyse, question, shape and create flows by connecting texts, art forms, ideas and languages. Exophonic writing, transnational literature and ecocriticism, were some of the topics chosen by our presenters to highlight these connections. Both keynote speakers also reminded us of the importance of applying a practice-based approach alongside a theoretical one, as they delved into the investigation of literary activism in Cameroon (Collins) and the history of journalistic translation (Valdeón). This thought-provoking day was however best summarised by Professor Bassnett and Dr Domínguez who identified the following keywords amongst the astonishing presentations: fluidity, confluence, fluency, flow, identity, travel, connectivity, memory, heritage, trust and communication.

Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the conference was moved online as a Zoom Webinar, which enabled us to attract a record number of 353 registrations and to have over 100 people in attendance at any panel. The conference day achieved a truly global reach with attendees tuning in from Austria, Bangladesh, Chile, China, Cyprus, France, Germany, Greece, India, Iran, Ireland, Italy, Mexico, New Zealand, Poland, South Africa, Spain, Turkey and the UK. The set of posters, alongside the biographies of our presenters and their abstracts, are displayed on the conference’s website.

https://pgconferencefluidity.com/

https://twitter.com/SmlcPGConf


First published: 20 December 2020

<< News