Kasia Szymanska

Kasia's first book Translation Multiples: From Global Culture to Post-Communist Democracy is forthcoming in 2025 with Princeton University Press (series: Translation/Transnation). Her research lies in literary translation, translation politics, 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 named the 2022 Martha Cheung Award winner for the best English article in Translation Studies by an early career scholar.

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.

BA/MA - University of Warsaw

MPhil - University of Cambridge

DPhil - University of Oxford

1) Kasia's first book Translation Multiples: From Global Culture to Post-Communist Democracy (forthcoming with PUP, 2025) focuses on a new genre of writing across English, Polish, German, and other languages, and discusses its cultural, philosophical and political relevance. It considers what happens as translators, poets and artists alike expose the act of translation by producing different parallel variants, placing them next to each other as legitimate versions of the original, and presenting them as a stand-alone artistic work. The book explains why translating more than once matters and calls for a redefined practice of reading translations which follows the ethics of the multiple.

She is currently working on three other projects:

2) The second book project is provisionally entitled The Cold Words Divide: Communication and Translation Across the Iron Curtain and will explore the recurring mechanisms of consolidating the Cold War divide in a range of previously unexamined texts related to literary translation, interlingual communication and language learning from the period of most intense polarisation within the continent: e.g., exoticised translations, invented languages and other imaginary ways of communicating with people from (often non-existent) places beyond the Iron Curtain, dictionaries, sham phrasebooks and actual phrasebooks from popular travel guidebooks, interlingual materials promulgated by cultural institutions such as the British Council and the Congress for Cultural Freedom, among others.

The two other projects are edited volumes:

3) The Bloomsbury Handbook of Modernism and Translation (co-edited with Rebecca Beasley) has been commissioned by Bloomsbury and its aim is to bring together scholars in modernist studies, translation studies and modern languages to study the relationship between modernism and translation from a more comparative and interdisciplinary perspective.

4) The Tender Translator: Olga Tokarczuk Across Languages (co-edited with Joanna T. Huss) is currently under contract with Legenda (series: Transcript), and explores the creative transformations of Olga Tokarczuk's writing across fifteen languages in a series of essays written by a group of international academics and Tokarczuk's translators.

Kasia was also one of the researchers involved in the AHRC/OWRI-funded project on Prismatic Jane Eyre and the Global Humanities Institute on Challenges of Translation. She is now a participant of the AHRC-sponsored Experiential Translation network.

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

Introduction to Translation Studies

Teaching weeks only:

Mondays, 1-2pm,

Tuesdays, 11-12pm (Zoom, by appointment)

Email: [email protected]