Keynotes

Claudia Benthien
“Contemporary Poetry Practices between Urban and Digital Spaces”
Oct 1, 12.00-13.00

Claudia Benthien (b. 1965) is Professor of German Literature at Universität Hamburg, Germany. Her research field covers Germans literature of the 17th–21st centuries (especially Baroque, Classicism, Early Modern, and Contemporary) as well as contemporary art and culture. The theoretical framework she uses spans cultural theory, gender studies, intellectual history, aesthetics and intermedial studies. Her recent research deals with poetry in the digital age (for which she has received an ERC Advanced Grant), specifically ‘public poetry’ in urban space and on the internet, as elaborated in her monograph Public Poetry. Lyrik im urbanen Raum (with Norbert Gestring, 2023).

Francis R. Jones
“Poetry translation as collaboration”
Oct 1, 17.00-18.00

Francis R. Jones (b. 1955) is Emeritus Professor of Translation Studies, Newcastle University, UK, and a translator of poetry, mainly from Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian into English, though also from Dutch, Hungarian and Russian. He has twice been awarded the Poetry Society’s Popescu Prize (formerly the European Poetry Translation Prize). In Poetry Translating as Expert Action: Processes, Priorities and Networks (2011), he explores how translators work within networks of people and texts: publishing teams, fellow translators, source-culture enthusiasts, and translation readers and critics.

Jahan Ramazani
“Mourning in Translation: A Poem’s Six-Hundred-Year Journey”
Oct 4, 11.30-12.30

Jahan Ramazani (b. 1960) is Professor of English at the University of Virginia, USA, a literary scholar specializing in modern British, Irish, American, African, Caribbean, postcolonial poetry within a global perspective. His published works include A Transnational Poetics (2009, the American Comparative Literature Association’s Harry Levin Prize for the best book in comparative literary history), Poetry and Its Others: News, Prayer, Song, and the Dialogue of Genres (2014), Poetry in a Global Age (2020). Ramazani is a recipient of numerous prizes and fellowships and is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2016) and the American Philosophical Society (2022).

A.E. Stallings
“Translating [through] Interesting Times”
Oct 3, 11.30-12.30

A. E. Stallings (b. 1968) is an American poet, essayist, and translator from Ancient Greek, Modern Greek and Latin and currently Oxford Professor of Poetry (2023–2027). She has published four highly acclaimed collections of poetry, winning the Richard Wilbur Prize for Archaic Smile (1999), and three book-length verse translations (e.g. Lucretius’s The Nature of Things (2007)), winning the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize in 2010. She is a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation and an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2012).

Peeter Torop
“Translating poetry in the age of new media: aspects of transliteracy”
Oct 2, 11.00-12.00

Peeter Torop (b. 1950) is Professor of Cultural Semiotics at the Department of Semiotics of the Institute of Philosophy and Semiotics at the University of Tartu, Estonia. He is also co-editor of the journal Sign Systems Studies and the book series Tartu Semiotics Library. He has been co-editor of special issues of the European Journal for Semiotic Studies (New Tartu Semiotics, 2000, 12:1) and the International Journal of Cultural Studies (The Uses of Juri Lotman, 2015, 18:1). His research field covers the history of translation, semiotic and transmedia aspects of translation, semiotics of culture and translation studies, literary studies and textology. His books include Tõlge ja kultuur [Translation and culture] (Tallinn – Tartu: Tartu Ülikooli Kirjastus, 2011); Totaaltõlge [Total translation] (Tartu: Tartu Ülikooli Kirjastus 2024), Text within Text – Culture within Culture (ed. with K. Kroó, Budapest-Tartu: L’Harmattan, 2014) and The Companion to Juri Lotman: A Semiotic Theory of Culture (ed. with M. Tamm, London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022).

Rein Raud
“Fidelity and Form: The Limits of Poetic Licence”
Oct 3, 16.00-17.00

Rein Raud (b.1961) is Distinguished Professor of Asian and Cultural Studies at the School of Humanities, Tallinn University, as well as a novelist, poet and translator of (among others) Dante Alighieri, Nelly Sachs, Paul Celan and William Carlos Williams, and a large number of Japanese and Chinese classical poets. His views on cultural theory are summarized in Meaning in Action (Polity 2016) and his more recent academic work includes Being in Flux: A Post-Anthropocentric Ontology of the Self (Polity 2021). He is the recipient of numerous literary prizes and fellowships, the Baltic Assembly Prize for Literature (2024) being the latest, and the only person to have been awarded both the National Research Award and the National Cultural Award of Estonia.

Mihhail Lotman
“Poetry as semiotic generator”
Oct 2, 16.30-17.30

Mihhail Lotman (b. 1952) is Professor Emeritus of Tallinn University and Visiting Professor of Semiotics at the University of Tartu. He is co-editor of the journals Sign Systems Studies and Studia Metrica et Poetica. He is the author of over 300 academic publications (including 7 monographs) in the fields of semiotics, poetics, linguistics, comparative literature and the history of Russian literature. In addition, he is the author of a large number of popular science and journalistic articles. YouTube contains more than a hundred of his lectures.