Phd in STUDIES IN ENGLISH LITERATURES, LANGUAGE AND
TRANSLATION

email: jacob.blakesley@uniroma1.it
phone:
building: Marco Paolo
room: 317

After having received a PhD in Italian from the University of Chicago in 2011, thanks to the help of a Mellon Dissertation Fellowship, I worked as an adjunct at the University of Manchester (2011-2012) and University of Durham (2012-2014). In 2014, I won a three-year Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship to study modern European poet-translators, which I held at the University of Leeds’ Centre for Translation Studies. I then won a University Academic Fellowship at Leeds in 2017, and was promoted to associate professor in comparative literature and literary translation in 2019. In 2022, I was promoted to full professor in comparative literature and literary translation. Through a chiamata diretta, I joined the Istituto Italiano di Studi Orientali (ISO) at the Sapienza University of Rome as associate professor in comparative literature. I work in different fields: comparative literature, literary translation and Translation Studies more broadly; Italian literature and Dante Studies; and Digital Humanities. I began my career studying modern and contemporary Italian literature, particularly at the intersection between literary translation and comparative literature. An example is my first monograph, Modern Italian Poets: Translators of the Impossible (Toronto, 2014): https://utorontopress.com/9781442646421/modern-italian-poets/ I then broadened my studies towards Europe more widely speaking, and with a sociological framework, which resulted in the following books and special journal issues: J. Blakesley, A Sociological Approach to Poetry Translation: Modern European Poet-Translators (Routledge, 2018): https://www.routledge.com/A-Sociological-Approach-to-Poetry-Translation-Modern-European-Poet-Translators/Blakesley/p/book/9780367732707 J. Blakesley (ed.), Sociologies of Poetry Translation: Emerging Perspectives (Bloomsbury, 2018): https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/sociologies-of-poetry-translation-9781350043275/ J. Blakesley and J. Munday (eds), ‘Poetry Translation: Agents, Actors, Networks, Contexts’, Translation and Literature 25.1 (2016): https://www.euppublishing.com/toc/tal/25/1. Continuing my research into poetry translation, I co-edited a special journal issue dedicated to the UK poet Tony Harrison: J. Blakesley and R. Bower (eds), ‘Tony Harrison: International Man of Letters’, English Studies 99.1 (2018): https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/nest20/99/1?nav=tocList. More recently, I’ve focused on the worldwide reception of Dante and questions of comparative literature more broadly speaking. Besides the co-editorship of the special journal issue of Comparative Critical Studies, together with A. Mangalagiri, R. Mucignat, E. Segnini (eds), entitled ‘How we compare’, Comparative Critical Studies 20.2/3 (2023): https://www.euppublishing.com/toc/ccs/20/2-3, I have published much on Dante in translation. My third monograph, A Global translation history of the Divine Comedy: from the 15th century to today, is under contract with Cambridge University Press. I have co-edited two volumes on the English-language reception of Dante: J. Blakesley, T. Cachey Jr., and F. Pich (eds), The Divine Comedy in English Translation. Critical Perspectives, Reception Histories, Assessments (Routledge, forthcoming); J. Blakesley and F. Coluzzi (eds), The Afterlife of Dante’s Vita Nova in the Anglophone World: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Translation and Reception History (Routledge, 2022): https://www.routledge.com/The-Afterlife-of-Dantes-Vita-Nova-in-the-Anglophone-World-Interdisciplinary/Coluzzi-Blakesley/p/book/9781032021065 I’ve published the following relevant articles and book chapters: J. Blakesley, ‘Comparing Translations of Dante’s Commedia’, Comparative Critical Studies 20.2/3 (2023): 293-318. J. Blakesley, ‘La popolarità globale della Commedia di Dante: traduzioni e biblioteche’, Tenzone 22 (2023): 269-293. J. Blakesley and F. Coluzzi, ‘Introduction. The Anglophone Vita Nova: readers and translators’, in The Afterlife of Dante’s Vita Nova in the Anglophone World: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Translation and Reception History (Routledge, 2022), 1-24. J. Blakesley, ‘The global popularity of Dante’s Divina Commedia: translations, libraries, Wikipedia’, Bibliotheca Dantesca 5 (2022): 115-144. J. Blakesley, ‘Gender imbalances in worldwide translations of the Commedia’, Studi italo–slovacchi 2022: 93-112. J. Blakesley, ‘Translating the classics’, in The Routledge Handbook of Translation History, ed. Christopher Rundle (London: Routledge, 2021), 372-388. J. Blakesley, ‘Distantly reading Dante translations’, Vertimo studijos 10 (2017): 65-75. Besides studies on the reception of Dante, I’ve published widely on literary reception, focusing specifically on Wikipedia: I edited, together F. Fischer, R. Jäschke, P. Wojcik, the special journal issue ‘Wikipedia, Wikidata, and World Literature ‘, Journal of Cultural Analytics 8.2 (2023): https://culturalanalytics.org/issue/7259. I’ve written several articles about this topic: ‘The global popularity of Dante’s Divina Commedia: translations, libraries, Wikipedia’, Bibliotheca Dantesca 5 (2022): 115-144. ‘The Wikipedia popularity of James Joyce’, James Joyce Quarterly 59.2 (2022): 289-313. ‘World literature according to Wikipedia popularity and book translations: the case of modern Italian poets’, Comparative Critical Studies 17.3 (2020): 433-458. ‘The Global Popularity of William Shakespeare in 303 Wikipedias’, Memoria di Shakespeare 5 (2018): 149-171. Besides all of this, I am co-author of the following well-known translation textbook: J. Munday, S. Ramos Pinto, J. Blakesley, Introducing Translation Studies, quinta edizione (Routledge, 2022): https://www.routledge.com/Introducing-Translation-Studies-Theories-and-Applications/Munday-Pinto-Blakesley/p/book/9780367370510 I co-direct two book series: Routledge Studies in Literary Translation: https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Studies-in-Literary-Translation/book-series/RRSLT Peter Lang Leeds Studies on Dante: https://www.peterlang.com/series/lsd I am one of the general editors of Comparative Critical Studies (https://www.euppublishing.com/loi/ccs), and I am on the editorial board of Status Quaestionis. Besides academic studies, I am also a translator: I won a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship in 2017. I’ve published translations in various journals, especially from Italian, and I have edited and translated an anthology of Italian short stories. I have co-directed for several years now the John Dryden Translation Competition.