MA Translation Studies

Michelle Bolduc

Programme Director, MA Translation Studies

Michelle Bolduc, a scholar of Translation Studies and Comparative Medieval Literature, began translating as a graduate student: first, excerpts from medieval texts, and then French letters written by the 20th-century Belgian philosopher of rhetoric, Chaïm Perelman. 

Her research has straddled the two disciplines—translation and rhetoric—ever since. Her book, Translation and the Rediscovery of Rhetoric (PIMS, 2020) presents a diachronic case study of how translation is the means by which rhetoric, as the art of reasoning, becomes a part of a lineage of (and a resource for) an ethics of civic discourse. She is also co-editor (with Marie-Alice Belle) of the recent volume A Cultural History of Translation in an Age of Cross-cultural Interaction, vol. 3: From the Eleventh to Sixteenth Centuries (Bloomsbury 2025).

Active as a translator, she is at the forefront of bringing the New Rhetoric Project into English: most recently, The Intellectual and Cultural Origins of Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca’s New Rhetoric Project: Commentaries on and Translations of Seven Foundational Articles, 1933-1958, with David Frank (Brill 2023).

Eliana Maestri

Senior Lecturer in Translation Studies

Eliana Maestri is Senior Lecturer in Translation Studies. She is interested in all forms of translation, especially the ones into lands of hope, care and respect. Her recent We Are the Possible projects centre on how translation can improve environmental communication and green citizenship. For this, she uses the intersemiotic potential of translation across media and modes to generate impactful work. Her work is underpinned by a fascination with various forms of translation as a creative act affecting life, matter, urban spaces and the arts. The urban aspects are explored in the successful Venice International University Summer School on Linguistic Landscapes: Using Signs and Symbols to Translate Cities, of which Eliana is a core faculty member.

Other activities focus on translation, creativity, and multimodality. With Alice Farris, she is the executive producer and subtitler of Palimpsest, a short documentary film on Transcultural Devon. She is also the co-organiser of the biennial editions of the Exeter Translation! Festival and the Translation Fest (2021; 2022). Eliana is the author of Translating the Female Self Across Cultures (2018) and has published on street art (2020), activism in translation (2025), ethnography and translation (2023), singing translators and mobile traditions (2017), and translation performed by Australian artists (2020; 2024) and displayed by writers in literary works (2022). Eliana enjoys studying translation as well as doing translation, especially to provide visibility to minoritized voices. With Dr A. Giorgio, Eliana translated into English key sections of Eleonora Mazzoni’s novel Le difettose.

Wenqian Zhang

Lecturer in Chinese and Translation Studies

Wenqian Zhang is Lecturer in Chinese and Translation Studies, and the Deputy Director of the Global China Research Centre at the Department of Languages, Cultures and Visual Studies. Her research interests include the translator’s brand, literary translation, sociology of translation, and Chinese Internet literature.

She is the author of the book Literary Translators’ Brand-Building in Contemporary Chinese-English Translation (Routledge, 2025), and the co-editor of the special issue “Literary Translatorship in Digital Contexts” (Translation in Society, 2024).

Katie Brown

Associate Professor of Latin American Cultural Studies

Katie Brown is Associate Professor of Latin American Cultural Studies, specializing in contemporary Venezuelan writing and narratives of migration.

As a translator from Spanish to English, she has published translations of short stories, essays, poems and plays, in publications including Latin American Literature Today and Modern Poetry in Translation. From Savagery (Selkies House; Restless Books, 2024), her translation of Desde la salvajada by Alejandra Banca, won a PENTranslates grant and was shortlisted for the 2025 Premio Valle Inclán.

Katie is particularly interested in translation as a collaborative act. As Co-Director of the ‘Digital Edition of the General Estoria’ project (funded by the Canadian SSHRC) she mentors student interns to translate a medieval Spanish universal history. She is also a founding member of the collective Colaboratorio Ávila.

Richard Mansell

Senior Lecturer in Translation
_{Image: Steven Haywood}

Richard Mansell is Senior Lecturer in Translation at the University of Exeter and Corresponding Member of the Institut d’Estudis Catalans, Barcelona. He works closely with stakeholders throughout the translated literature sector of the UK publishing industry, and is the co-author with Helen Vassallo of Getting Started as a Literary Translator: Translated Literature and Publishing (Routledge, 2026). His research also focuses on the relationship between translation and place, analysing the visibility of translation in our urban fabric and its repercussions on individuals and society.

Chloe Paver

Associate Professor of German

Chloe Paver is Associate Professor of German. Her expertise is in German history museums, particularly those concerned with the two 20th-century dictatorships. In recent years her work has turned increasingly to the discourses running through exhibitions and to exhibition paratexts. This work includes speech-making, translation practices, and the availability of simplified German (‘leichte Sprache’) for visitors with learning difficulties. Germany and Austria are pioneers in this form of intra-lingual translation, which works together with other communication methods to increase social inclusion and accessibility. Students on the MA Translation have worked with Chloe and the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum to evaluate the museum's accessible communication practices.

Helena Taylor

Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature

Helena Taylor is an Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature. A specialist in early modern French literary and cultural history, she has worked extensively on the translation and reception of ancient Greek and Latin works in France (in a recent monograph); and more widely across periods (as co-editor of Women Creating Classics: A Retrospective and Women Re-Creating Classics: Contemporary Voices, Bloomsbury, 2025). She is interested in historical approaches to translation studies and has co-edited a special issue of Perspectives: Studies in Translation Theory and Practice (T&F, 2025) on 'Early Modern Actors of Translation' and is member of the core group leading a 5-year Flanders Research Council  (FWO)-funded project, 'Translation through Time: Towards a New Vocabulary for Translation Studies'. She is also a published translator having recently published an open access translation from French of philosophical dialogues by Madeleine de Scudéry (1607-1701).

Muireann Maguire

Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature

Muireann Maguire is Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature. Muireann is interested in literary translation history, particularly the lives of Russian-to-English literary translators and their interactions with publishing companies. Her monograph Invading the American Canon (Bloomsbury Academic, 2025) examines the translation of Russian literary fiction in the US between 1863 and 1984, through a series of case studies. She has also co-edited (with Cathy McAteer) and contributed to the edited volume Translating Russian Literature in the Global Context (Open Book, 2024).

Between 2019 and 2023, she led a European Research Council-funded Starting Grant, RUSTRANS, which investigated the political aspects of literary translation from Russian in the US, UK, and Ireland in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Her current research include a new book project on the translation of Russian science fiction and a British-Academy funded study of the translation of contemporary Russophone fiction by emigre writers. 

Katharine Hodgson

Professor in Russian

Katharine Hodgson is Professor in Russian. As part of her work on twentieth-century poetry written in Russian she led an AHRC-funded collaborative project on the ways in which the canon was reshaped in the years following the collapse of the Soviet Union. She has also worked on Russian poetry of World War Two, and produced the first extended study in English of the Leningrad poet Olʹga Berggolʹts (1910-75). Other publications include studies of how poetry by Heinrich Heine, Rudyard Kipling, and Bertolt Brecht has been translated into Russian. She has contributed to teaching on the MA in Translation, including Russian workshops for the ‘Practice of Translation’ and the ‘Translation as Literary and Creative Practice’ modules, and dissertation supervision.