BLOOMINGTON, IN — On November 3-4, 2023, the Center for Cultural Affairs (CCA) will host the 2nd Humanities in Cultural Affairs workshop, “Cultural Affairs in Translation,” on the Bloomington campus at Indiana University (IU). The event, co-chaired by Russell Valentino, IU Professor of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures, brings in three outside professors: Esther Allen, Professor of Latin American, Iberian, and Latino Cultures at Baruch College; Christopher Merrill, director of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa; Sean Cotter, Professor of Literature and Translation Studies at the University of Texas at Dallas; and Rhi Johnson, Assistant Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Indiana University, as well as several IU Humanities colleagues across multiple departments, for a pop-up exhibit and reception alongside an academic workshop.
The event begins on Friday, November 3, from 4:30 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. at the Lilly Library for an evening reception and a showcase of translation archives from fellow IU humanities colleagues. The group will convene on Saturday, November 4, from 10:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. at the O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs for an intimate academic workshop going further in-depth on these cultural affairs in translation topics and hearing from those in the field.
“This workshop will focus on two related questions,” said Valentino. “First, we’ll be thinking about an archive established by Breon Mitchell, former director of the Lilly Library, which houses the papers of more than fifty literary translators working from various languages into English. This is an important if hidden aspect of the history of creative writing and publishing in the U.S. Second, we want to explore the question of how to highlight such a resource and make it useful. The specifics of this case will enable us, we hope, to broach the larger topic of such archival projects in general, how we decide what to forget and what to preserve, and once we’ve made the latter choice, how to make what we have preserved both accessible and culturally present.”
Registration to attend the pop-up exhibition and reception on Friday, November 3, 2023, can be found here. Follow this link to register for the academic discussion on Saturday, November 4, 2023. The deadline for registration is October 27, 2023.
The Humanities in Cultural Affairs workshop series at the CCA blends interdisciplinary IU humanities scholars and O’Neill faculty and practitioners at the Center for Cultural Affairs leading workshops aimed to reconnect the humanities with public policy in cultural affairs. The series is funded by the National Endowment for Humanities. Learn more and register here for the Humanities in Cultural Affairs series.
