Emily Wittman

Emily Ondine Wittman

she/her

Professor

Education

  • PhD, Comparative Literature, Princeton University
  • BA, Philosophy, Magna Cum Laude, Yale University

Research Areas

  • Autobiography
  • International Modernism
  • Translation Studies
  • Contemporary World Literature
  • Creative Nonfiction

Bio

I am a professor in the Department of English, the only comparatist in the department. My research and teaching interests include international modernism, the practice and theory of translation (with particular attention to modernism and translation), contemporary world literature, and, in particular, life-writing (from antiquity to the present). I am the author of Interwar Itineraries: Authenticity in Anglophone and French Travel Writing (Amherst College Press) and The New Midlife Self-Writing (Routledge). I have just published Translation and Modernism: The Art of Co-Creation (Routledge). I am also the co-editor (with Maria DiBattista) of The Cambridge Companion to Autobiography (2014) and Modernism and Autobiography (Cambridge UP, 2014).

I received the university-wide Outstanding Commitment to Teaching Award and served for three years as a Distinguished Teaching Fellow in the College of Arts & Sciences.

I direct the minor in World Literature.

Selected Publications

Books

  • Translation and Modernism: The Art of Co-Creation, Routledge.
  • The New Midlife Self-Writing, Routledge.
  • Interwar Itineraries: Authenticity in Anglophone and French Travel Writing, Amherst College Press.
  • The Cambridge Companion to Autobiography, co-edited with Maria DiBattista, 2014.
  • Modernism and Autobiography, co-edited with Maria DiBattista, Cambridge UP, 2014.

Translated Books

  • Guattari, Félix. Soft Subversions: Texts and Interviews 1977-1985. Ed. Sylvère Lotringer. Co-translated with Chet Wiener. Cambridge, MA: Semiotext(e)/The MIT Press, June 2009.
  • You Will Covet (novel), trans. from the French of Ornela Vorpsi.

Book Chapters

  • “The Friendship Between Joseph Conrad and André Gide,” Friendship and the Novel, Ed. Allan Hepburn, McGill-Queen’s University Press, forthcoming.
  • “Michiko Kakutani” (co-authored with undergraduate Michael Rowe). Asian-American Literature, Ed. Keith Lawrence. New York: Praeger, forthcoming.
  • “I Don’t do Sketches from Memory.” Co-authored with Paul Wright. Polyvocal Dylan, Ed. Joshua Toth. New York: Palgrave, 2019.
  • “Literary Non-fiction.” The Routledge Handbook of Literary Translation, Ed. Kerry Washborne and Ben Van Wyke. New York: Routledge, 2019.
  • “Modernist Translation.” The Cambridge History of Modernism. Ed. Vincent Sherry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016.
  • “Translation and the Modernist Novel.” A History of the Modernist Novel. Ed. Gregory Castle, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
  • “‘Death Before the Fact’: Posthumous Autobiography in Jean Rhys’s Good MorningMidnight and Smile Please.” Modernism and Autobiography. Eds. Maria DiBattista and Emily Wittman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.
  • “Literary Narrative Prose and Translation Studies.” The Routledge Handbook of Translation Studies. New York: Routledge, 2012.
  • “Travel Writing,” Hemingway in Context. Eds. Debra Moddelmog and Suzanne del Gizzo, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
  • “A Clean, Well-lighted Place for Killing: Nostalgia in Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon,” Ernest Hemingway and the Geography of Memory: Eds. Mark Cirino and Mark P. Ott. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press. 2010. 186-203.
  • “Subterranean Collegiate Blues: Reading Bob Dylan’s Chronicles as a Required Freshman Text,” co-authored with Paul Wright. Substance, Judgement, and Evaluation: Seeking the Worth of a Liberal Arts, Core Text Education. Ed. J. Scott Lee et al. New York: University Press of America, 2010. 121-126.
  • “The Decline and Fall of Rachel Vinrace: Reading Gibbon in Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out,” Virginia Woolf and the Art of Exploration, Eds. Helen Southworth and Elisa K. Sparks, Clemson Press, 2006. 161-169.

Articles

  • “A Dispatch from Cojimar,” UNSAID 8, 2021.
  • “The English Ward,” Co-authored with MFA student Stephen Gropp-Hess, The New Orleans Review, 39.2, 2014.
  • “‘Un des nôtres‘: Joseph Conrad and La Nouvelle Revue française,” Conrad First,  2013.
  • “A Circuit of Ordeals: Nostalgia and the Romance of Hardship in Ernest Hemingway’ Green Hills of Africa and Graham Greene’s Journey Without Maps.” Prose Studies, 33.1 (April 2011).
  • “The Prize-Granting Committee: Teaching Contemporary World Literature,” Co-authored with undergraduate Danie Vollenweider. THEN. (2010)
  • “Twisted Tongues, Tied Hands: Translation Studies and the English Major.” Co-authored with undergraduate Katrina D. Windon. College English, 72.5 (May 2010): 449-469.
  • “An Award Heard Around the World? Ismail Kadare and the Inaugural Man Booker International Prize,” Expositions 1.1 (March 2007): 89-104.
  • “Dylan’s Back Pages as Curriculum,” co-authored with Paul Wright, The Chronicle of Higher Education, 54.7 (October 2007): B12-13.

Interviews

Translation Projects

Book Reviews

  • In Shofar and Comparative Literature