Swedish, Slovene, and Italian! Fiction, folklore, and art history! Join us for the first of our two-part reading series featuring three outstanding UW translators.

Our inaugural event and the first of a two-part fall reading series will feature three members of our community who will read and discuss certain of their translations. Amanda Doxater, Chair of Swedish Studies in the UW Scandinavian Studies Department, will be reading from her translation of Swedish author Karin Boye’s novel, Crisis (Kris 1934), which is forthcoming at Norvik Press; Veronica Muskheli, PhC in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, will be reading “The Frog Maiden,” which is her translation of “Žabica," a folktale originally collected in 1950 from the storyteller Tina Wajtawa in a Slovenian village in Northern Italy; and Zakiya Hanafi, prolific translator and Affiliate Assistant Professor in Human-Centered Design and Engineering, will be reading a passage from her translation of Francesco Zucconi’s Displacing Caravaggio: Art, Media, and Humanitarian Visual Culture (Palgrave MacMillan, 2018). We will close the session with a 30 minute Q&A. Swedish, Slovene, and Italian! Fiction, folklore, and art history! It promises to be quite a night.

Our goal with this reading series is to underline the overall levels of interest and engagement in our multidisciplinary UW translation community. Working closely with the newly anointed and faculty-led Translation Studies Hub, we aim to continue so doing throughout the year in sundry and surprising ways.

We look forward to seeing you (all of you); This event, as will always be the case, is free and open to the public.

Reader biographies:

Amanda Doxtater is Barbro Osher Endowed Chair of Swedish Studies in the UW Department of Scandinavian Studies. Her research interests include: film melodrama, Nordic art cinema, performance and translation studies, design-thinking, and public-facing scholarship in the humanities.

Veronica Muskheli is a PhC at the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at UW, where she is completing her dissertation on the representation of mothers and daughters in East Slavic folktales and the influence of those narratives on contemporary Russian literature. Working on English translations of folktales for her research, Veronica has become interested in translation of folk narratives and literary fairy-tales for wider audiences. A native speaker of Russian and a Russian technical and medical translator and interpreter, she has also taken Slovenian language and translation theory and practice courses at UW from Dr. Michael Biggins, who is an important translator of Slovenian literature into English. Currently, Veronica is working on translations into English and Russian for the publishing house Sanje of twelve fairy-tales by a prominent Slovenian writer Svetlana Makarovič.

Zakiya Hanafi is an Affiliate Assistant Professor in Human-Centered Design and Engineering. She teaches designers how to localize and globalize their products by understanding how culture and geopolitics impact experience. She is the author of The Monster in the Machine: Magic, Medicine and the Marvelous in the Time of the Scientific Revolution (Duke UP, 2000). As a translator from Italian and French to English, she has published ten books in philosophy and the arts, including Guido Mazzoni’s Theory of the Novel for Harvard UP. She also practices her craft as a multi-lingual editor for SAGE Publications (London) and linguistic quality reviewer for TransPerfect Medical Device Solutions (New York). Previously, she taught Technical and Scientific Translation at Ca’ Foscari University in Venice, Italy, and, before that, was an Assistant Professor of Romance Languages at the UW.