Wednesday, 2/25, 12pm, Sarah Miller McCune Conference Room (HSSB 6020)
The Disability Studies Initiative & the Translation Studies Program at UC Santa Barbara are delighted to invite you to a conversation between deaf writer Adèle Rosenfeld and deaf translator Jeffrey Zuckerman on Rosenfeld’s French novel (Les Méduses n’ont pas d’oreille, 2022) and Zuckerman’s translation into English. This event is co-organized by FRIT faculty members Prof. Catherine Nesci and Prof. Giancarlo Tursi. It is co-sponsored by the Center for Feminist Futures, Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, and the Departments of English, Feminist Studies, French and Italian, the Writing Program, and the College of Creative Studies.
For a Zoom option, including ASL interpreting, please register here at this link or via the QR code below.
Adèle Rosenfeld’s superb debut novel Jellyfish Have No Ears (Graywolf, 2024) features several models of disability (religious, medical, social, cultural, phenomenological) in its exploration of deafness as a sensorial and embodied experience. The novel weaves a “colorfully sonorous story with surreal details. As the reader follows protagonist Louise grappling with the decision of whether or not to get a cochlear implant, they are brought into a world that is challenging, imaginative, and filled with love. Through Louise’s professional life as a Town Hall employee to her personal life with friends, family, and lovers, Jellyfish Have No Ears intimately invites readers to explore what it’s like to live with a hearing impairment.” (https://pen.org/adele-rosenfeld-the-pen-ten-interview/)
Jeffrey Zuckerman is a literary translator from French. He translates works from mainland France, from Mauritius (including novels by Ananda Devi, Shenaz Patel, and Carl de Souza) and Tahiti, and from the queer canon (including texts by Jean Genet, Hervé Guibert, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Kev Lambert). A graduate of Yale University, he has been awarded a PEN/Heim translation grant, the French Voices Grand Prize, and fellowships from MacDowell, the NEA, and the Hawthornden Foundation. For the entirety of his work, he was named a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French government. He was recently awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to support the translation of the Franco-Palestinian novelist Karim Kattan’s Eden at Dawn. Zuckerman’s 2024 translation of Adèle Rosenfeld’s Jellyfish Have No Ears received the 2025 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize.