Dr. Ursula Friedman Defends Dissertation, Accepts Harvard Postdoctoral Fellowship

We are delighted to share that Ursula Friedman, a graduate student in EACLS and Comparative Literature, has successfully defended her dissertation titled “Self-translation as Method: Modern Sinophone Self-translators and their Transmediated Afterlives,” with a committee of Hangping Xu (advisor), Xiaorong Li, and Dominique Jullien She has accepted a postdoctoral fellowship position in Translation Studies and Comparative Literature at Harvard University in their College Fellows program. Please join us in congratulating Ursula on her accomplishments!

Ursula’s dissertation investigates the cultural politics and cosmopolitan aesthetics of self-translation as a literary phenomenon, that is, authors translate their own works into other languages. Expanding the notion of self-translation to include questions of transmediation, her project also looks at the ways in which our increasingly hypermediated world offers literature certain aesthetic and critical affordances when it is being rendered and disseminated in other mediums such as film and theatre. Meticulously analyzing self-translated texts, their transmediated iterations, the itineraries of circulation, and historical contexts, the project makes significant contributions to such fields as Translation Studies, Comparative Literature, Media Studies, and Chinese and Sinophone Literary and Cultural Studies. It is perhaps worth noting that among the several Chinese and Sinophone authors whom Ursula’s dissertation examines, one is actually a founding member of our department, namely, Kenneth Hsien-yung Pai (白先勇).