Florencia Ferrante
(University of Genoa)
29 April 2026 (Wednesday) at 13:00 CET
Institute of World Literature SAS + online
The lecture is organized as part of the APVV project Translation and aspects of reception of social science and humanities texts as cultural and literary transfer in the 20th century.
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In recent years, translation scholars have developed further awareness of the different theoretical and methodological issues that any historical account entails. This “historiographical turn” in translation studies helped raise new questions about the relationship that a history of translation is supposed to establish with general history and with other disciplinary histories as well — such as book history, literary and intellectual history, the history of philosophy, science, religion. At the same time, translation historians have adopted diverse historiographical models in an effort to identify the best suited approaches, concepts and tools to carry out their research.
The aim of this lecture is, first, to observe and discuss some of the main working metaphors and concepts that historiography has lent to translation history scholars over recent decades — such as typicality and representativity versus clues and normal exceptions, hegemonic narratives versus the margins, micro and macro history and their intersections —, and how these were implemented to establish both objects of study and explanatory narratives of causality and change. Second, I will aim to illustrate, through the delimitation and analysis of a constellation of 18th century religious translations between Europe and Spanish America, the capacity of an entangled history of translation to unsettle established historical assumptions regarding the circulation, reception, and critical fortune of ideas, authors, and texts.
Florencia Ferrante is an assistant professor at the University of Genoa. She studied Literature at the University of Buenos Aires and Italian Studies at the University of Bologna. In 2019 She obtained a PhD in Comparative Literature at the University of Modena. She has been a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Genova in a national research project concerning the history of non-literary translation from Italian to Spanish in Latin America. She is the author of a book (Juan Rodolfo Wilcock critico, ETS, 2022) and of different research articles about translation history and literary criticism published in international journals such as Rassegna Iberistica, Hispamérica, 1611. Revista de historia de la traducción and Meta.