List of members

 

Associate Members

External Collaborators

Profiles

Professors

John London

Professor John London works in the fields of Catalan theatre, art, poetry and translation studies. Among his publications are Reception and Renewal in Modern Spanish Theatre (1997) and Contextos de Joan Brossa (2010) which was awarded the Serra d’Or prize for Catalan Studies. With David George he has edited Contemporary Catalan Theatre (1996) and Modern Catalan Plays (2000). John has also translated more than thirty plays, several of which have received productions in the UK, the USA and Australia.

Cristòfol Tripiana

Cristòfol Tripiana has a Bachelor’s Degree in Translation and Interpretation and a Master’s Degree in Teaching Catalan to Immigrants. He has experience as a translator from English, French, German and Spanish into Catalan in various areas, both in the private and public sectors. In the latter, he has also taught Catalan to speakers of other languages. He has also worked as a proofreader for the Valencian Media Corporation. Some of his fields of interest are language teaching and learning, dialectology and sociolinguistics. He has been teaching Catalan at Queen Mary since October 2022.

PhD students

Charlotte Byrne

Her interdisciplinary PhD project is a historical novel exploring the experiences of queer Catalan women during the Spanish Civil War and the early years of Franco’s dictatorship. Working in a practice as research mode, she is adapting narrative patterns present in feminist Catalan historical novels such as Rodoreda’s La plaça del diamant and Barbal’s Pedra de tartera, among others. The novel also draws upon contemporary accounts of the time, as well as theories of trauma and postmemory, and aims to give a voice to those silenced under fascism and create a bridge between Anglophone and Catalan fiction and cultures.

James Thomas

His doctoral research is geared towards an understanding of translation as both a practice and a mechanism for the reception of Catalan culture in Britain, Ireland and North America during the nineteenth century. Using a selection of core Catalan texts, it will investigate how the Romantic and Victorian periods saw Catalan gradually establish itself within the Anglosphere as a distinct language from Occitan and how the Catalan-speaking lands were progressively imagined as different to the dominant representations and stereotypes of Spain. His thesis will also examine how knowledge of Catalan was negotiated into English both directly and via other languages such as French, Spanish, German and Italian. This project has been made possible thanks to funding from the Balearic Islands Doctoral Studentship in Catalan Studies (2020-2023) in partnership with the Institut Ramon Llull.

Beth Caygill

Beth Caygill is currently investigating the role of translation in exploring feminist aspects of texts, with a view to creating a genealogy of twentieth-century Catalan women’s poetry. Her main interests are translation theory, the representation and aesthetic of gender in text, and intersemiotic translation.

After completing a BA in Modern Languages and Music at the University of Birmingham, she turned her attention to contemporary Catalan women poets and has produced translations for Metamorphoses and for academic texts.

She is an associate of the Stephen Spender Trust, an organisation that promotes poetry in translation through an annual competition and workshops for primary and secondary school children. Her research is funded by the Balearic Islands Doctoral Scholarship, in partnership with the Institut Ramon Llull.