Dr ELIANA Maestri

Dr Maestri graduated in Modern Languages and Literature (English and French) from the University of Parma, Italy (2000) and obtained her PhD in Translation Studies from the University of Bath (2012). She was a EUOSSIC Erasmus Mundus Post-Doctoral Fellow in European Studies at the Universities of Bath and Sydney, Australia (2011-2012). She was also the recipient of the 2014 MEEUC Research Fellowship at the University of Monash, Melbourne, working on Italian Australian second and third generations as 'self-translators'.

Dr Maestri's projects incorporate the study of translation across languages, cultures and media borders. She is particularly interested in looking at how cultural products are translated across media and/or modes and how migration and/or the city shape acts of translation. With a 2022 Alumni Annual Fund award (Exeter), Dr Maestri led the production and the subtitling of Palimpsest: Stories from Transcultural Devon, a short film on the migration to Devon (see Transcultural Devon). Using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England (2022-23), Dr Maestri led ‘12 Stories for 12 Days of COP27’, a public engaging project carried out to translate stories around climate change into artwork and echo the UN COP27 conference on the climate emergency. '12 Stories for 12 Days of COP27’ was part of We Still Have a Chance, a bigger international project which forged links between Egypt and Exeter. Together with colleagues from Exeter, KU Leuven and IUAV University of Venice, Dr Maestri is one of the core faculty members of the Venice International University Summer School: Linguistic Landscapes: Using Signs and Symbols to Translate Cities. She is currently an Associate Member of the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women’s Writing (University of London) and acted as the Director of the Centre for Translating Cultures from 2019 to 2023. Dr Maestri is one of the main co-organizers of the successful Exeter Translation! Festivals (2017; 2019; 2022) with Exeter colleagues and the Translationfest (2021; 2022) with the Universities of Ferrara, Italy, and Valencia, Spain. Both types of events explore translation in its many forms, as professional practice, mediation, metaphor, linguistic exercise and experiential learning across sensory borders.

Dr Maestri is the recipient of a number of awards. She received an Arts Council England award in 2022-23, a British Academy Rising Star Engagement Award to co-organize the 2019 Exeter Translation! Festival and of a 2019 Europe Network Grant (Global Partnerships, Exeter) with KU Leuven, Belgium, to study street art (in London, Bristol, Palermo, Antwerp and Brussels). In 2023, Dr Maestri and Prof Robert Hugh received an Open Innovation Platform grant to translate climate stories into European and non-European languages, including Arabic. Previous awards include: a British Federation of Women Graduates grant (2006), and Roberts fundings from the Research Council U.K to co-organize the post-graduate symposium Negotiating Modernity, the University of Bath (2010).

Dr Maestri's publications focus on translation, migration, mobility, gender, literature and visual culture. Australia has inspired her, informing her research and approach to translation. Dr Maestri has published on interpretations of Europe among migrants in Australia, on translations of mobile traditions into Italian Australian folk music (with Prof Rita Wilson, Monash) and on acts of translation (including linguistic ones) within depictions of cityscapes in the visual arts, with particular attention to prominent Australian artist Jon Cattapan. With Dr Christina Horvath, Dr Maestri has co-edited a special issue in Romance Studies on female filiations in honour of internationally acclaimed literary scholar Dr Adalgisa Giorgio. Dr Maestri has contributed with an article on mothering, migration and intercultural mediation, focusing on the representation of the figure of the interpreter and child language broker in Italian Australian literature. Dr Maestri has also published on street art in anti-mafia contexts (with Prof Inge Lanslots and Dr Paul Sambre, Ku Leuven). Her monograph Translating the Female Self across Cultures appeared in the 2018 John Benjamins Translation Library.

Dr Maestri teaches translation on the MA in Translation Studies, convening such modules as 'Translation Theory' (SMLM150), 'Introduction to Interpreting' (SMLM157) and 'Translation as Cultural and Intermedia Practice' (SMLM158). She also convenes the undergraduate 'Transcultural Devon' module (SML3042) applying aspects of translation and ethnography.

Before coming to Exeter, Dr Maestri was a Teaching Fellow and Italian Language Coordinator at the University of Warwick (2013-16) and Lector of Italian at the Universities of Oxford (2008-11) and Bath (2001-05). She also tutored at Bristol University’s Language Centre, and taught undergraduate units and specialist Master’s modules in Translation Studies at the Universities of the West of England, Warwick and Portsmouth. She attended specialist training courses in language teaching methodologies and obtained funding to attend summer schools in Translation Studies and Intercultural & Gender Studies at the University for Foreigners of Perugia, University College London, the University of Utrecht, the University of Florence, and Monash University, Melbourne (Australia). She delivered workshops on teaching methodologies internationally: Athens, Berlin, Budapest, Florence, Johannesburg, Madrid, Oxford, Dublin, Warsaw, and Rome. While in Oceania, Dr Maestri delivered guest lectures in Translation and Gender at the Universities of Sydney and Monash (Australia) as well as Auckland and Wellington (New Zealand).

At Exeter, Dr Maestri has received various Above and Beyond awards, including two 2020 Guild Teaching awards, for the best pastoral tutor in the College of Humanities on Streatham campus and all Colleges on Devon campuses. Before joining Exeter, in 2008 she was the recipient of a ‘Student Employee of the Year Award’ at Bath and in 2011 she achieved joint second place in the R.H. Gapper Postgraduate Essay Prize competition (Society for French Studies).

Research supervision:

I am open to discussing research proposals on any relevant subject given my research expertise. I am especially happy to consider working with candidates with interests in the following areas:

- translation and migration

- translation and the city and/or cityscapes

- translation and the visual

- translation and feminism

- gender in/and translation

- the agency of the translator

- translation and multimodality / intermediality

- subtitling

- self-translation, retranslation and/or indirect translation

If you are interested in working with me, please e-mail me a 500-word outline of your proposed research topic and a copy of your CV.