Influence in Slavic Contexts

Brian Baer, Nila Friedberg, and Leonid Livak
Chair: Eugenia Kelbert

Brian Baer is Professor of Russian and Translation Studies at Kent State University. He is founding editor of the journal Translation and Interpreting Studies, and co-editor of the Bloomsbury book series Literatures, Cultures, Translation, with Michelle Woods, and of the Routledge book series Translation Studies in Translation, with Yifan Zhu. He publishes widely on translation history, translation pedagogy and translation theory. His most recent publications include the monographs Translation and the Making of Modern Russian Literature and Queer Theory and Translation Studies: Language, Politics, Desire; the collected volumes Researching Translation and Interpreting, with Claudia Angelelli (2015), Translation in Russian Contexts, with Susanna Witt (2018), and Queering Translation, Translating the Queer, with Klaus Kaindl (2018); and the translations Culture, Memory and History: Essays in Cultural Semiotics, by Juri Lotman, and Introduction to Translation Theory, by Andrei Fedorov. He is current president of the American Translation and Interpreting Studies Association and sits on the international advisory board of the Mona Baker Centre for Translation Studies at Shanghai International Studies University.

Nila Friedberg is Associate Professor of Russian at Portland State University. Her interests include linguistic approaches to literature, language contact, twentieth century Russian poetry and poetics, and Russian Jewish literature. She is the author of English Rhythms in Russian Verse: On the Experiment of Joseph Brodsky (Mouton de Gruyter, 2011) – a monograph which investigates the “English” flavor in Joseph Brodsky’s verse and traces the semantic associations of “English-sounding” rhythms in Brodsky’s Russian poetry. She is also a co-editor, with B. Elan Dresher, of the volume Formal Approaches to Poetry (Mouton de Gruyter, 2006). She received her Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Toronto in 2002 and was a postdoctoral fellow at the UCLA Slavic Department in 2002-2004. At PSU she teaches, or has taught, Russian Phonetics and Phonology, Languages of the World, all levels of Russian, Russian for Heritage Speakers, Poets and Politics, Twentieth and
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Nineteenth Century Russian Literature (in Russian). She has previously taught Russian at the Middlebury College Russian School and UCLA, taught linguistics and phonetics at the University of Toronto and York University in Canada, and served as a coordinator of the Heritage Russian program at PSU in 2004-2009.

Leonid Livak is Professor of Russian Literature in the University of Toronto's Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and the Anne Tannenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies. He is the author of How It Was Done in Paris: Russian Emigre Literature and French Modernism (2003), The Jewish Persona in the European Imagination: A Case of Russian Literature (2010), Russian Emigres in the Intellectual and Literary Life of Interwar France: A Bibliographical Essay (2010), and more recently In Search of Russian Modernism (2018) . Leonid’s research interests include French and Russian literature and cultures in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Modernist studies, Jewish studies, comparative approaches to literary, and cultural studies.

This roundtable discussion was part of the online conference 'Stylistic Border Crossings in and Beyond Translation', 9-10 March 2023. The conference was organised by the East Centre and the British Centre for Literary Translation, University of East Anglia.