Keynote Speakers
International Comparative Literature Association (ICLA) Presidents
- Sandra Bermann, Princeton University, USA, Former President of ICLA (2019-2022)
- Lucia Boldrini, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK, President of ICLA (2022-2025)
Keynote Speech
Sandra Bermann, Princeton University, USA, Former President of ICLA (2019-2022)
Bio
Sandra Bermann is Cotsen Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton. She has authored The Sonnet Over Time: Studies in the Sonnets of Petrarch, Shakespeare, and Baudelaire; translated Manzoni’s On the Historical Novel; co-edited Nation, Language, and the Ethics of Translation; and A Companion to Translation Studies, along with many scholarly articles and reviews. Her current projects focus on lyric poetry, translation studies, and new directions in comparative literature.
Professor Bermann has had longstanding interests in extending literary research programs internationally. During her 12 years as Chair of Princeton’s Department of Comparative Literature, she expanded its international reach as she also co-founded Princeton’s Program in Translation and Intercultural Communication and led the President’s working group to create the Bridge Year Program, offering students a year’s service abroad. She was President of the American Comparative Literature Association from 2007-09 and of the International Comparative Literature Association from 2019-2022.
Lucia Boldrini, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK, President of ICLA (2022-2025)
Bio
Lucia Boldrini is Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Director of the Centre for Comparative Literature at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her research interests include fictional biography and autobiography; Joyce, Dante and modernist medievalism; comparative literature; and literature on and from the Mediterranean area. Among her books: Autobiographies of Others: Historical Subjects and Literary Fiction (Routledge, 2012); Joyce, Dante, and the Poetics of Literary Relations (CUP, 2001); and as editor, Experiments in Life-Writing: Intersections of Auto/Biography and Fiction, with Julia Novak (Palgrave, 2017). She was Academic Co-Director, with Ivan Callus and Stella Borg Barthet, of the Erasmus+ Strategic Partnership “Mediterranean Imaginaries: Literature, Arts, Culture” (2016-2018). She has been General Coordinator of the European Network of Comparative Literature Studies (REELC/ENCLS, now ESCL/SELC). She is Editor-in-Chief, with Michael Lackey and Monica Latham, of the Bloomsbury “Biofiction” book series. She is an elected member of the Academia Europaea, and currently serves as President of the International Comparative Literature Association.