CGS Event: Approaches to Translation and Translators' Visibility: Gender and Border-Crossing

CGS Event: Approaches to Translation and Translators' Visibility: Gender and Border-Crossing

Date & Time: April 2nd, 2025: 10:00 am - 3:00 pm

Language: English

Organisers: Dr. Juliana Buriticá Alzate, Prof. Olivier Ammour-Mayeur

Venue: ICU Dialogue House, Seminar Rooms 202-203 ICU

The event will be held face-to-face only (no online streaming)

The Center for Gender Studies at ICU invites you to join an academic roundtable discussion with Dr. Hitomi Yoshio, Dr. Irina Holca, Dr. Letizia Guarini, and Dr. Juliana Buriticá Alzate. We will discuss our current edited volume project, titled Making Translation Visible: Gender, Hybridity, and Border-Crossing in Modern and Contemporary Japanese Literature, and explore issues related to gender and border-crossing as we think about approaches to translation and translators' visibility. Some of the questions we will address are: Why is the awareness of translation and the visibility of translators important? How can visibility be political, and what is its connection to gender? How can we reconcile translation theories with the tangible practice of translation as an art form?

Schedule 

10:00 - 12:00 Open academic roundtable discussion: please join us, no reservation is needed.

12:00 - 13:00 Lunch break

13:00 - 15:00 Closed specialist workshop (manuscript-based). If you are a specialist in literature and/or translation and would like to participate, please send an email to p001909m@icu.ac.jp or cgs@icu.ac.jp.

Participants profiles:

Irina Holca is Associate Professor at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. She is a specialist in Japanese naturalism (particularly Shimazaki Toson), but her most recent interests include translation theories and practice. She has written on the translation of Japanese literature in communist Romania and has edited the English translation of Japanese Literary Theories: An Anthology (2024, Lexington Books). She has also translated works of modern and contemporary Japanese literature into Romanian (e.g., Natsume Sōseki's "I Am a Cat" and Yoshimoto Banana's "Kitchen")

Letizia Guarini is Associate Professor at the Department of Intercultural Communication of Hosei University, Japan. Her research examines contemporary Japanese literature from a gender perspective. She has recently published "Ikoku no kyodōtai de ibasho wo mitsukeru. Suga Atsuko no ekkyōsei wo megutte" (Shōwa kenkyū no. 90, 2025), and "Trans Bodies and Gender Fluid Fatherhood in Contemporary Japanese Literature" (Gender Fluidity in Japanese Arts and Culture. Critical Essays, McFarland, 2025). She has translated several works by contemporary Japanese authors into Italian.

Hitomi Yoshio is Professor of Global Japanese Literary and Cultural Studies at Waseda University, where her work focuses on the intersection of modern and contemporary Japanese literature, gender studies, and translation studies. She has published articles in both Japanese and English on topics including women writers, feminism and literary history, reproductive justice, and post-3.11 literature. She is the translator of Imamura Natsuko's This Is Amiko, Do You Copy? (Pushkin Press, 2023) and co-translator of Kawakami Mieko's forthcoming works, Sisters in Yellow (Knopf), Ashes of Spring (Amazon Audible), and Dreams of Love, Etc. (Knopf). 

Juliana Buriticá Alzate is Departmental Lecturer of Modern Japanese Literature at the University of Oxford, a literary translator based in the UK, and a research fellow at the Center for Gender Studies at International Christian University (ICU). Her research brings together queer and feminist theory to explore representations of mothering and related embodied experiences in contemporary Japanese fiction. She has recently published "Breastfeeding, Folklore and Nature: Reading Oyamada Hiroko's 'Spider Lilies' and Matsuda Aoko's 'Enoki'"(Japanese Language and Literature Journal, 2024), and has translated Aoko Matsuda's Where the Wild Ladies Are into Spanish (Quaterni, 2022).