About

Michelle Bolduc

Michelle Bolduc is Professor of Translation Studies (Exeter; HCTI-Université de Bretagne Occidentale), and has published extensively on the intersections of medieval literature, translation, and rhetoric, including her books Translation and the Rediscovery of Rhetoric (2020) and The Medieval Poetics of Contraries (2006).

She is co-editor of two volumes, forthcoming in 2024: first, with Marie-Alice Belle, Translation in An Age of Cross-Cultural Interaction, 1100-1600, volume 3 of the 12-volume series, Translation: A Cultural History (general editor, Lieven D’hulst); second, with Emma Cayley and Thomas Hinton, Imagining Courtly Communities: The Network and The Individual.

Her research also comprises modern rhetoric and its translation; see her co-authored book (with David A. Frank) of translations and commentaries The Intellectual and Cultural Origins of Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca’s New Rhetoric Project (2023).

Freyja Cox Jensen

Freyja Cox Jensen is Associate Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Exeter, UK, where she works on classical reception, the histories of the book and of printing and performance, and historical translation studies.  She read Ancient and Modern History at Christ Church, Oxford, before going on to complete her MSt and DPhil there. 

After a year spent as a Stipendiary Lecturer at Merton College, Oxford, she returned to Christ Church in 2010 to take up a Junior Research Fellowship, before joining the University of Exeter in 2012.  She is co-director of Exeter’s Centre for Early Modern Studies, and Centre for Environmental Arts and Humanities.

Brecht de Groote

Brecht de Groote is a tenure-track Assistant Professor of English in the Faculty of Arts & Philosophy of the University of Ghent in Belgium. He previously held (post)doctoral positions at the Universities of Edinburgh and Leuven.

His research focuses on the literature and culture of the Romantic period, extending into the eighteenth century and the late-Romantic 1840s and 1850s.

Combining methods at the intersection of literary theory, media theory and translation theory, he investigates the ways in which British culture was shaped by practices and ideas of mediation and translation. Brecht has a monograph with Edinburgh University Press, Thomas De Quincey: Romanticism in Translation, and has published in a range of journals. He is currently working on a new book project provisionally titled Pseudo-Romanticism, which is to examine how the Romantics imagined interlinguistic and intermedial transfers.

Helena Taylor

Helena Taylor is an Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Exeter, where she was previously a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow. She holds a BA in French and Latin (2007), an Mst in European Literature (2008) and a DPhil in French Literature (2013) from the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on the intellectual and literary history of early modern France, particularly the seventeenth century, with interests in cultures of learning, women's varied intellectual practices and their reception, classical reception, translation studies and cultural quarrels.

She is the author of Women Writing Antiquity: Gender and Learning in Early Modern France (Oxford University Press, 2024) and The Lives of Ovid in Seventeenth-Century French Culture (Oxford University Press, 2017), and co-editor, with Fiona Cox, of Ovid in French: Reception by Women from the Renaissance to the Present (Oxford University Press, 2023) and, with Kate Tunstall, of a special issue of Romanic Review entitled Women and Querelles in Early Modern France.

Beatrijs Vanacker

Beatrijs Vanacker holds a PhD in French literature and is currently affiliated with KU Leuven as an assistant professor in French Literature and Literary Translation. She previously held postdoctoral fellowships from the FWO, during which she was a research fellow at LMU München and McGill (Montréal). Her current research focuses on cultural transfer and literary translators in the long eighteenth century.

She published widely on (pseudo)translation and eighteenth-century (women) translators and she is the PI of two ongoing research projects that explore the role of translation and cultural transfer in the (Southern) Low Countries.

Together with Helena Taylor and Freyja Cox Jensen, she is guest editor of a special issue on the visibility of translators as cultural agents in the Early Modern Period, to be published in Perspectives.

Alisa van de Haar

Alisa van de Haar is an Assistant Professor of French literature at Leiden University. She obtained her PhD cum laude from the University of Groningen in 2018. Her research interests include historical multilingualism, the history of language education, and the intersection of migration and language. She particularly focuses on the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Low Countries, and the interplay between French and Dutch literary culture. In 2019, her monograph The Golden Mean of Languages: Forging Dutch and French in the Early Modern Low Countries, 1540–1620 was published by Brill.

She is the co-editor, with Dirk Schoenaers, of Francophone Literature in the Low Countries (1200–1600) (Amsterdam University Press, 2021). From 2022 to 2026, she conducts a research project on ‘Languages as Lifelines: The Multilingual Coping Strategies of Refugees from the Early Modern Low Countries’, funded by the Dutch Research Council (Veni scheme).