Alice-Catherine Carls to Deliver “Translation as a Laboratory for Life” Lecture
On Thursday, March 23, 2023, noted French American scholar and translator Alice-Catherine Carls will deliver a public talk called “Translation as a Laboratory for Life” on the University of Oklahoma (OU) Norman campus. Reflecting on five decades of passionate engagement with European and American history as well as world literature, Dr. Carls will share the inspirations behind her work as a humanities scholar and how it has been enriched by deep knowledge of German, Polish, French, English, and Latin.
Sponsored by Oklahoma Humanities; OU’s Department of History; Department of Modern Languages, Literatures & Linguistics; the Schusterman Center for Judaic & Israel Studies; and World Literature Today, the event will begin with a reception at 4:00 p.m., followed by Dr. Carls’s lecture at 4:30 p.m., then Q&A with the audience. It will take place in the Gibbs College of Architecture’s Buskuhl Gallery, Gould Hall 130, 830 Van Vleet Oval, and will also be livestreamed on Zoom.
Alice-Catherine Carls is Alsatian by birth, lived in Paris for many years, earned three degrees from the Sorbonne (including a PhD), and is now the Tom Elam Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Tennessee at Martin. An accomplished literary scholar and translator as well as a historian, she has contributed to World Literature Today since the 1980s and is currently a WLT editorial board member. Her main area of specialization is twentieth-century European diplomatic and cultural history, with a specialization in Polish history. In 2000 she started the UT Martin Civil Rights Conference and led it until 2007. As a member of the Tennessee Great War Commission from 2014 to 2018, she organized commemorative events and a World War I travel study; she also enlisted students to prepare a database on West Tennessee during the world wars.
Dr. Carls’s knowledge of the German, Polish, French, and English languages and cultures has led her to translate more than twenty books and many additional texts from Polish and English into French and from French into English, most recently: Almost Ashore (poems from English into French), by Gerald Vizenor; Les Oubliettes (novel from Polish into French), by Zofia Romanowicz; Notre courage est notre mémoire (poems from English into French), by Marilou Awiakta; and Apparences (poems from English into French), by N. Scott Momaday. She is the co-author of Europe from War to War, 1914–1945 (Routledge, 2018), translated as L’Europe d’une guerre à l’autre, 1914–1945 (Septentrion, 2020), and the co-editor of Finding Schifrah: The Memoirs of Sonja Dubois, Dutch Child Holocaust Survivor (DuBois Press, 2019).
Funding for this program is provided in part by a grant from Oklahoma Humanities (OH) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this program do not necessarily represent those of OH or the NEH.
For accommodations, please call WLT at 405-325-4531 or email [email protected].
