Guest Speaker: “Intermediaries, Translators and Mediators: The Making of World Authorship”, Gisèle Sapiro (Sociology, EHESS/CNRS, Paris)

Gisèle Sapiro

Professor of Sociology at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) and Research Director at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS)

Monday, April 29, 2024
12 pm – 2 pm

RSVP to attend via Zoom

In this public seminar, Professor Sapiro will explore the role of intermediaries and mediators in the process of how literary works cross borders (or not). Based on Bourdieu’s analysis of the social conditions of international circulation of ideas, she will elaborate on the political, economic, and cultural factors weighing on circulation and social inequalities in access to transnational recognition (gender and ethnicity).

Seminar Readings:

– Sapiro, Gisèle. (2016). “How Do Literary Texts Cross Borders (or Not),” Journal of World Literature 1:1, 81–96.
– Sapiro, Gisèle. (2022). “Literature Festivals: A New Authority in the Transnational Literary Field,” Journal of World Literature 7, 303–331.
– Bourdieu, Pierre. (1999). “The Social Conditions of the International Circulation of Ideas.” In R. Shusterman, ed., Bourdieu: A Critical Reader, 220–228. Blackwell.

Gisèle Sapiro is Professor of Sociology at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) and Research Director at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), member of Academia Europeae, and recipient of the Silver Medal of the CNRS (2021) and Humboldt Research Award (2023). Her areas of interest are the sociology of culture, literature, intellectuals, translation, publishing, law, and the epistemology and history of the social and human sciences. She is the author and editor of more than a dozen books that have been translated into many languages. Her most recent monographs include Peut-on dissocier l’œuvre de l’auteur? (2020) and Des mots qui tuent. La responsabilité de l’intellectuel en temps de crise, 1944-1953 (2020). She is the editor of Dictionnaire international Bourdieu (2020) and of The Routledge Handbook of the History and Sociology of Ideas (2024).

This lecture is part of the UCLA Program in Experimental Critical Theory (ECT) and the ECT Spring 2024 seminar on “Ternary Positionality: Relationality, Decoloniality, and Interpretation”, taught by Zrinka Stahuljak (Comparative Literature/ELTS).

The Spring 2024 ECT Seminar is generously sponsored by the Deans of Humanities and Social Sciences, the Department of Comparative Literature and the University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI).