Dr Jonathan Evans
- Reader (Translation studies)
email:
Jonathan.E.Evans@glasgow.ac.uk
pronouns:
He/him/his
Biography
Before joining Glasgow as Senior Lecturer in 2020, I held positions at the University of Exeter, the University of Hull and the University of Portsmouth. I was promoted to Reader in 2024.
Research interests
Trained as a comparatist, my research sits at the intersection of literature, film, and popular media. I am particularly interested in the surprising and complex ways people adapt, adopt, and make use of international culture.
My first book, The Many Voices of Lydia Davis (Edinburgh University Press, 2016), examined how authorship across different modalities of writing can be construed. Analysing Davis’s work across translation and creative writing, it posited various dialogic relationships that could be seen in stories that responded to translations and other readings, translations that bore imprints of Davis’s stories, and the use of translation as a structuring device in some of her stories.
Since 2012, I have been working extensively on film and media. I have written about transcultural fandoms, international film remakes, streaming platforms and global TV, board game cultures, slow media, and YouTube videos. Some of this work has been funded by the AHRC, the ESRC, the Fund for International Collaboration, and the Newton Fund/British Academy. This research has led to articles and special issues in leading journals as well as edited collections such as Translating and Receiving Korean Media and Translating Sexuality (both open access).
My second monograph, written with Ting Guo (Liverpool), focuses on Fan Translations (Bloomsbury 2025), that is, translations created by fans as part of the fan community. Offering a critical introduction to the topic, it challenges fan studies to explore practices beyond the Global North, in places where access is often mediated through interlingual translation and through unofficial productions. It also examines global queer solidarities as they are enacted through the circulation of popular culture and the shifts in platform logics that have led to more and more translated media on global screens.
My current project is a monograph on Queering the Global Screen, which is another collaboration with Ting Guo. It combines our exploration of the Chinese translation of Anglophone queer cinema in China, done as part of an AHRC funded project, with analysis of the translation of queer cinema from around the world in the UK and the USA. Through close readings of translations, interviews with translators, ethnography and paratextual analysis we challenge the notion of the 'global gay' and examine how translations of queer cinema always engage in negotiation of meaning and identities as part of their intervention in local debates.
I am currently developing two new projects. One focuses on Little Magazines and zines as sites where international media and ideas are contested and negotiated. A pilot for this work has funding from the Royal Society for Edinburgh. It explores archives from magazines such as International Times (UK), L’internationnale situationniste (France) and The Seventies (Hong Kong) as well as The Third Eye centre (Glasgow) and collections in the University of Glasgow library, asking how ideas travelled from one group to another. It questions prevailing understandings of the counterculture as a metropolitan, American phenomenon and highlights its important transnational practices, especially in less central locations.
My second new project examines the post-internet small town on TV and in literary texts, exploring its imbrications with both countryside and city and its many intercultural and transnational aspects. I plan to focus on the complexities of small town nostalgia, discourses of being left behind, and the travelling cultures based within small towns.
I have also co-edited the Routledge Handbook of Translation and Politics with Fruela Fernandez (University of the Balearic Islands). A second edition, with Mattea Cussel (UAB) joining the editorial team, has recently been completed.
Grants
- 2025 Principal Investigator, 'International Counterculture in the 1970s: Glasgow and Hong Kong', Royal Society of Edinburgh small grant (£3907)
- 2021 Principal Investigator, 'Towards diversity, equality and sustainability in streaming: Translating British media in Korea and Korean media in the UK', Fund for International Collaboration and ESRC (£47500)
- 2018 Co-Investigator, ‘Translating for Change: Anglophone Queer Cinema and the Chinese LGBT+ Movement’, AHRC ECR grant (£248595)
- 2016 Co-Investigator, ‘Fan Translation in Viet Nam’, British Academy Newton Fund Mobility Grant (£9102)
- 2015 Co-Investigator, ‘Language service providers in the digital age’, University of Portsmouth Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences research fund (£13,000)
- 2015 Co-Investigator, ‘Musical fan communities: Connected across borders’, University of Portsmouth Interfaculty research fund (£6100)
Supervision
I would be happy to supervise research students working on topics related to my research:
- International, comparative and intercultural approaches to literary history
- Film and screen accessibility across languages and cultures
- Gender and sexuality across cultures
- Intercultural and translational fan activities
I am currently supervising or cosupervising students at Glasgow working on a range of topics including gender and sexuality, translation history, comics and fandom. Please get in touch to discuss possible topics.
Please note I no longer have capacity to take students for 2027 or 2028 entry.
I am also available to supervise visiting PGR students. Please get in touch if you are interested.
Former students:
- Rui Yang (PhD, University of Glasgow 2026)
- Yujia (Flavia) Jin (PhD, University of Glasgow 2026)
- Yifei Kong (PhD, University of Glasgow 2026)
- Misha Campello Gramelius (PhD, University of Glasgow 2026)
- Menghui Zhang (PhD, University of Glasgow 2026)
- Qing Guo (PhD, University of Glasgow and Nankai University, 2025)
- Yunjing Ouyang (PhD, University of Glasgow, 2025)
- Mengxue (Vera) Zhao (PhD, University of Glasgow, 2025)
- Marjorie Huet-Martin (PhD, University of Portsmouth, 2024)
- Eugenia Lawrence (PhD, University of Portsmouth, 2021)
Current students:
- Donna Wilson
- Elise Sandbach
- Liang Guo
- Tianqi Su
- Qiunong Liu
- Liu, Qiunong
The Strategies of Contemporary Chinese Queer Theatre Production and Its Embodiment of Queerness Under the Conditions of Censorship
Teaching
Classes I teach or have taught at Glasgow include:
- Intercultural Communication
- Marketing and Media Across Cultures
- Subtitling and Media Accessibility
- Intercultural Literacies (Curriculum for Life)
- Introduction to Translation Studies (UG)
- Modernities II (Critical Studies)
- Translation Studies in Theory and Practice
- Literary Translation
- Classic European Cinema
- Global Narratives of Crisis
- Postcolonial Literature, Theory and Visual Culture
- Intoduction to Interpreting
- Approaches to Translation and the Professional Environment
- Practical Translation Workshop 1
I also contribute to teaching on the Glasgow-Nankai Joint Graduate School MSc Translation Studies.
Additional information
I am Assistant Head of School. I was previously PGT convenor (2021-2024).
I am deputy editor of The Journal of Specialised Translation (Impact Factor 2.061 [2020], SJR Q1 Linguistics and Language [2019-2025]).
I am on the editorial boards of:
I am core staff on the HKBU Media Translation and Digital Culture Research School.
I was a member of the AHRC Peer Review College from 2020-2023.
I regularly peer review manuscripts for leading international journals such as PMLA, Target, The Translator, Translation Studies, TTR, Perspectives: Studies in Translation Theory and Practice, Translation Spaces, The Interpreter and Translator Trainer, Journal of Internationalization and Localization, Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, The Popular Culture Studies Journal, Literature Compass, Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, Genre and others. I also review proposals and manuscripts for presses such as Cambridge University Press, Edinburgh University Press, Bloomsbury Academic, Routledge, Palgrave Macmillan, Presses Universitaires de Nancy, John Benjamins and others.
I have been external examiner for PhD theses at University of Southampton, University of Manchester, Queen's University Belfast, Hong Kong Baptist University, University of Auckland, and Hong Kong Polytechnic University.
External examiner, MSc Translation Studies, University of Edinburgh, 2020-2024.
External examiner, MA Translation Studies, University of Birmingham, 2018-2022.
External examiner, MA Audiovisual Translation, University of Roehampton, 2017-2021.