Roundtable discussion participants
Karen Bennett is Associate Professor in Translation Studies at Nova University, Lisbon, and coordinator of the Translationality strand at the research unit CETAPS (Centre for English, Translation and Anglo-Portuguese Studies). She is general editor of the journal Translation Matters and member of the editorial board of the Brill series Approaches to Translation Studies. She also has a background in music, having studied piano, musical theory and musical appreciation to advanced level. Her research interests include: history and theory of translation; ways of construing and translating knowledge; intersemiotic translation (between literature, music and dance) and multimodality.
Benjamin Davis studied English and related literature at the University of York and an MA in Theatre Directing at Goldsmiths’ College, London before becoming a staff director at Welsh National Opera from 2001-2011. He has since worked as a freelance opera director for regional and national opera companies and festivals in the UK, the Netherlands, Denmark, France, Germany, Austria, Spain, Switzerland, Italy, Canada, North America, and China. His doctoral thesis was a practice-based study on Performing Realism in contemporary opera productions, sponsored by the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Opera and Drama (CIRO), Cardiff University. He is an Associate Researcher at Cardiff and has also taught at Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, University of the Arts London, and at Wales Academy of Voice and Dramatic Arts, University of Wales Trinity Saint David.
Jane Forner is a musicologist whose work focuses on contemporary opera in Europe and North America. Her research examines intersections of race and gender, cross-cultural operatic composition, and feminist approaches to contemporary music. Her current book project in-progress, Operatic Encounters Across the Mediterranean: Cultures of Collaboration, examines twenty-first century operatic practices of Arab-diasporic artists working in Europe. Focusing on operas created in the past ten years, this research analyses the politics of multilingual and intercultural opera creation, situating each case study in the context of migration and colonial legacies across contemporary Europe. Her recent and forthcoming publications include a postcolonial analysis of Thomas Adès’s Tempest opera, examinations of digital opera by women and BIPOC artists, and feminist analyses of contemporary operas based on the mythological figure of Lilith. She completed her PhD at Columbia University, and is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto.
Tom Metcalf is an interdisciplinary researcher and composer specialising in music and comparative arts form the 20th century to the present day, focussing specifically on textual relationships between musical and visual phenomena. He is currently the Junior Anniversary Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, Edinburgh University, pursuing his project Photography and/as Music which explores the relationships between the two media in textual, metaphorical, and philosophical terms, suggesting that photography’s material and ontological properties are palpably felt in development of key musical concepts of the 20th century, such as indeterminacy, improvisation, and early forms of sonification.
Tom achieved his DPhil from Oxford University in 2021 with a thesis entitled Graphical Ekphrasis in Contemporary Music supported by a portfolio of compositions which demonstrate aspects of his theoretical research. His work has been published in Music Analysis, Tempo, Leonardo, The Journal of the Royal College of Organists, Principles of Music Composing, and Question.
Tom taught at Oxford from 2018-2022, and in 2021 was appointed to a Junior Teaching Fellowship at the Ashmolean Museum, focussed on interdisciplinary and object-focussed teaching for undergraduates and postgraduates. In January 2023, Tom was appointed to the DECR Committee of the Association for Art History.
For more on Tom’s work as a composer, see his website: www.thomasmkmetcalf.com.
Sofía Lacasta Millera (Jaca, 1995) holds a degree in Translation and Interpreting from the University of Salamanca (2017), where she also completed a Master's degree in Specialised Translation and Intercultural Mediation, with international mention METS at the Université ISIT in Paris and the University of Swansea (2018). She has completed these studies with numerous courses and seminars in the fields of literature, visual arts, music and theatre. She has participated in several conferences on research into new trends in translation, as well as in publications specializing in culture and translation. At present, she is on a pre-doctoral contract at the University of Salamanca, where she is researching the intersemiotic and multimodal translation of postmodernist works not only from a linguistic point of view, but also from an artistic, musical and philosophical one, highlighting the importance of the visual and sonorous landscape of these works.
Zhaolong Liu is currently a third-year PhD student in Translation Studies at School of Modern Languages and Cultures, University of Glasgow. His research interest lies in the English translation of Louis Cha’s martial arts novels. Liu has published some research articles on Translation Studies in peer-reviewed journals and has delivered a number of papers at academic conferences held in Mainland China, Hong Kong and the United Kingdom.