December 2025: Faculty Publications and News

Executive Board

Alice Kaplan’s most recent publication is “Mark Twain à contre-courant,” Des Aventures de Huckleberry Finn à James de Percival Everett” (November 27, 2025) in La Nouvelle Revue Française 663.” She is currently working on a book about the Nuremberg trials, returning to archives she inherited from her father, a member of the team of prosecutors who drafted the indictment and argued the aggressive war case.  The question of translation will be central—both the invention of simultaneous translation machines in the courtroom,  and the ghostly presence of Yiddish.

Peter Cole’s most recent book, On the Slaughter by Hayim Nahman Bialik, was published this fall by New York Review Books, and a stand-alone version of the introduction to the book appeared on the New York Review online. His other recent publications include Aharon Shabtai’s Requiem and Other Poems (New Directions, 2025) and That Simple? … That Complicated: Conversations on Poetry and Translation (Free Poetry, 2024), a digital version of which is available (without charge) here, and hard copy of which can be requested (also without charge). Cole was recently named Professor in the Practice of Poetry and Translation in Jewish Studies and Comparative Literature.

Advisory Board

Shawkat Toorawa’s The Devotional Quran: Beloved Surahs and Verses appeared last year with Yale University Press and the paperback edition followed this year. The audiobook is forthcoming. An interview with him about the book appears on Common Word podcast, and
another is forthcoming on the New Books Network. The book was named one of the best spiritual books of 2024 by Spirituality & Practice.

Jane Tylus’s most recent publications are Who Owns Literature: Early Modernity’s Orphaned Texts (Cambridge, 2025 and a translation of Dacia Maraini’s Chiara di Assisi: Elogio della disobbedienza for the series “Other Voices in Italian Literature” (Rutgers University Press, 2023. She was recently elected to Italy’s Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei. Her current projects include an edition/translation of the religious poetry of the 16th-century writer Moderata Fonte, coming out with Toronto and being prepared with Erminia Ardissino

Olivia Lott’s recent translations include The Roof of the Whale Poems, by Juan Calzadilla (Venezuela), co-translated with Katherine M. Hedeen (University of Wisconsin Press, 2023) and Almost Obscene, by Raúl Gómez Jattin (Colombia), also co-translated with Katherine M. Hedeen (CSU Poetry Center, 2022). Time is a Cryptic Text, by Lauri García Dueñas (El Salvador), is forthcoming with co•im•press.

Amara Lakhous’s latest novel, The Fertility of Evil—originally written in Arabic as Tir Elil (The Night Bird) and longlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2021—was published in French by Actes Sud in 2024 and will appear in English (Other Press) and Italian (Edizioni e/o) in 2026. The Fertility of Evil represents the first experiment of the Translingual Collective Translation Project, presented at Yale in March 2024, through which Lakhous collaborates closely with his translators: Alexander Elinson (English), Francesco Leggio (Italian), and Lotfi Nia (French). This collaboration offers an extraordinary opportunity to exchange ideas, challenge perspectives, and affirm that languages are like mirrors: the more mirrors we have, the better we can see ourselves. In March 2026, the second Translingual Collective Translation event will focus on the second volume of the trilogy, The Fifth Hyena, originally written in Arabic. Additionally, in Spring 2026, Lakhous will teach a graduate course—open to selected undergraduate students—titled Writers as Self-Translators: From Samuel Beckett to Jhumpa Lahiri.

Jill Jarvis’s translation of Mamadou Diouf’s “Africa in the World’s Time” has just been published by the University of Chicago Press and is forthcoming with Seagull Books.

Nichole Gleisner’s translation of the memoir Beyrouth entre parentheses, by Sabyl Ghoussoub, is forthcoming in "Writing in French: New Archipelagoes," from Liverpool University Press. She is currently at work on a new project translating the letters of Louise de Coligny-Châtillon, Apollinaire's famous "Lou"; Her article about this correspondence will be published in the next issue of the journal Women in French Studies. 

Allesandro Giammei curated a complete edition of the works in verse by Dario Villa, a Milanese poet who translated Basil Bunting, William Blake, Arthur Rimbaud, and Christopher Isherwood into Italian (forthcoming as Opera in versi with Crocetti editore). A selection of poems was published in advance in Nuovi Argomenti. He also published  Parlare fra maschi, an essay about sisterhood and self-consciousness among men, and curated Anna della pioggia e altri racconti ritrovati, a posthumous anthology of lost short stories by Michela Murgia that stemmed from a translation project—both with Einaudi (2025). He was recently presented with the Howard R. Marraro Prize for Ariosto in the Machine Age (University of Toronto Press, 2024) by the Modern Language Association.

David Francis is currently working on a new translation project that focuses on poets from Northern Mexico.

Jinyi Chu’s recent book Fin-de-siècle Russia and Chinese Aesthetics: The Other is the Universal (Oxford University Press, 2024) examines how translation shaped the emergence of Russian modernism and its reconfiguration of world culture. An interview with him talking about the book appears on Yale News. His essay collection on reading Russian literature and its translations across geopolitical boundaries between US, China, and Russia, World-Feeling: Russian Literature and Geopolitics, written in Chinese, is forthcoming with Sanlian Shudian in 2026. His translation of Elif Batuman’s acclaimed The Possessed into Chinese is forthcoming in 2026 as well.

Alex Gil’s translation of the lost manuscript of Aimé Césaire’s play about the Haitian Revolution, ……Et les Chiens se taisaient/……And the Dogs Were Silent, published in August 2024 by Duke Press has been well received by reviewers on both sides of the Atlantic. Musab Younis, writing for the London Review of Books comments that "Gil’s superb translation adds a formidable new work to Césaire’s corpus,” and Rob Jacobs, writing for CounterPunch, writes that Gil "keeps the rhythm and styling of the French intact.” Alex Gil will be co-teaching a graduate seminar on "Translating the Caribbean” with Kaiama Glover (Black Studies) in Spring 2026