Following my BA in English Literature at the University of Manchester, I received full funding from the Modern Languages and Cultures Departmental Studentship to continue for an MA there, specialising in translation theory and the work of Jorge Luis Borges. I was then awarded the Cyril Vysove Scholarship to support my DPhil at Queen's College, Oxford. 

My project will examine the twin-corpus of a selection of Latin American author-translators (with names as canonical as Borges and Cortázar) to argue for the centrality of translation in the evolution of Latin American experimental narrative in the twentieth century. Literary translation studies has become so invested in a concept of translation as 'cultural transposition', or a covert scene of ideological intervention, that it risks forgetting the linguistic ‘problem’ which first brought translation to our interest: its technical impossibility.  

Translation is an encounter which disrupts our most basic assumptions about literary influence. It is simple enough to observe that a writer 'finds inspiration' in the authors he once translated (whether out of interest, or for the extra income), importing their characters, images, and tropes into his own fictional world. But what facilitates stylistic change, I argue, are the traces of a linguistic violence which his translations first made necessary, the discomfort of a target language (such as Spanish) bending and stretching to accommodate a strange and incompatible source (the English, say, of a Chesterton novel). As I wish to demonstrate, it is only when he tries to force this marriage that a Latin American translator realises the flexibility of the Spanish language, which might then be exploited in narratives projects of his own.

Publications

 ‘Anglophilia and Excess in “El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan”’, Variaciones Borges, 58 (2024), pp. 199–220. Winner of the Society for Latin American Studies Masters Prize, 2024. URL.

Translations

Itziar Gúzman and Andrea Aguilar, To the Glasshouse (Madrid: This Side Up, 2025). URL.

Conference Papers

“Montañas Nevadas”: trauma textual en un himno de mujer.’ ‘Violencias y emociones en la historia del tiempo presente’, HISTEMAL – Instituto Mora (virtual), 20 June 2024.

‘Anglophone Subtexts and the Problem of ‘Excess’ in “El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan”’, ‘CLACS Symposium in Latin American and Caribbean Studies,’ University of Manchester, 4 June 2024.

Research Interests

Translation theory and practice, Jorge Luis Borges, philology, linguistic philosophy, transatlantic criticism, Modernism(s), the Spanish Civil War/Postwar, deconstruction.