Dr Cosima Bruno

I obtained a bachelor’s degree in Chinese Language and Literature from Ca’ Foscari University, Venice. I worked for almost a decade as a translator and interpreter from Chinese, before coming to SOAS at the turn of the millennium to undertake doctoral research on contemporary Chinese poetry and its translation. I have always believed in the power of literature, like all arts, to bring us closer to possible worlds, and I am particularly interested in contemporary poetry and in translation as ways of experiencing and understanding the world. 

My research to date has been focusing on the role of translation and other forms of cultural mediation in the evolution, contestation and renegotiation of literary authority and power.  My first monograph, Between the Lines: Yang Lian’s Poetry through Translation (Brill, 2012) challenges dichotomous approaches to translation and offers a new methodology of studying poetry through translation.  

My co-edited The Bloomsbury Handbook of Modern Chinese Literature in Translation (2023) collects more than thirty authors’ contributions to the study of modern Chinese literature from the perspective of its translation.  Another main strand of my research pertains to inter-arts transculturation and aims at synthesizing and revising relational theories of literature and translation, to provide new tools for a critical understanding of the literary work and its environment. 

I also published essays on ecopoetics and on sound poetry. 

What I hope to do in my lectures is to ask questions about China and use literature to examine how we go about answering them. 

I welcome PhD applications in modern and contemporary Chinese and Sinophone literature and translation studies. 

• contemporary Chinese poetry
• poetry performativity
• translation studies
• ecopoetics
• bilingual migrant poetry 
• intermedial poetry 
• sound studies