Centre for Translating Cultures

Research seminar

Wednesday, January 22nd, LT6 Laver Building, 15:30-17:00

Main speaker: Prof Monica Good (University of British Columbia, Okanagan)

Chair: Dr Katie Brown (Modern Languages and Cultures)

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, Queen's LT4.1, 15:30-17:00

Main speaker: Dr. Tom Stennett (University of Exeter)

Discussant: Dr Alexandra Reza (University of Bristol)

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: Dr Carlotta Moro (University of Exeter) and Dr Catherine Evans (University of Exeter)

Title: Pregnant with Thought: Women Writing Philosophy in Early Modern England and Italy

How did early modern women, often excluded from formal learning, engage with, write, and shape philosophical thought in Europe? The Cultures of Philosophy project seeks to address this by looking beyond ‘legitimate’ forms of philosophy, such as the treatise, dialogue and essay, to include marginalia, miscellany, paratext, dedications, historical fiction, hagiography, and incidental ‘salon’ verse. 

Two of the project’s research fellows will present their initial findings on the English and Italian contexts, specifically examining how women’s writings on pregnancy, childbirth, and childrearing engage with philosophical debates. Despite the prevalence of the Socratic midwife metaphor, the philosophical significance of motherhood has often been ignored, with subjective accounts from mothers seen as “unworthy of serious attention” (Lintott and Stander-Staudt, 2013). Plato’s Symposium argues that there are pregnancies of the soul and pregnancies of the body, and that those of the soul are inarguably more valuable as they lead to “wisdom and virtue”, which are “fairer and more immortal” than a child. However early modern women’s accounts of motherhood demonstrate they were successful multitaskers: capable of discussing the metaphysical, moral, and medical issues surrounding the begetting, birth, and rearing of a child whilst being engaged in all these activities.

Catherine Evans will examine the English context, discussing how Mary Rich and Mary Carey explore miscarriage and the death of their young children in their devotional works. Rich and Carey depict maternal suffering as a site of religious conversion, both chastising and consoling themselves for these losses. Carlotta Moro will focus on Camilla Bonfiglio’s overlooked Libro in lode delle donne e sulla crudeltà degli uomini (Book in Praise of Women and On the Cruelty of Men, ca. 1619-1620), which draws on a variety of literary forms – from the treatise, to the sonnet, to the poem in terza rima – to critique patriarchal rule as a tyrannical abuse of power arising from cruelty, and, conversely, to extol women’s capacity for love and generosity, most profoundly expressed through the experience of motherhood.

This work is supported by the European Research Council-selected Starting Grant, ‘Cultures of Philosophy: Women Writing Knowledge in Early Modern Europe’, funded by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), under the UK government’s Horizon Europe funding guarantee.

Research seminar

jointly organized by the Centre for Translating Cultures and the Centre for Medieval Studies 

Wednesday, March 19, room TBA, time TBA, Research Seminar by Prof Emma Cayley (Leeds)

Details TBA

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.