Dr Cosima Bruno

Dr Cosima Bruno obtained a bachelor’s degree in Chinese Language and Literature from Ca’ Foscari University, Venice. 

She 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. 

Cosima Bruno’s main research interests are in contemporary Sinophone poetry and in literary translation. She believes that literature, like all arts, has the power to bring us closer to possible worlds and cross the ridgeline of our world.

Her research to date has been shaped by three principal aims. One aim is to explore the role of translation and other forms of cultural mediation in the evolution, contestation and renegotiation of literary authority and power. She has in this regard expanded her research to include ecopoetics and bilingual migrant literature. Another aim is to study inter-arts transculturation and transmedia poetry. A third aim is to revise relational theories of literature and translation, to provide new tools for a critical understanding of the literary work and its environment.

Her current project falls under the multidiscipline of sound studies, dealing with sound poetics from the Sinophere. She aims to place sound in its cultural and social resonance at the heart of poetic experience, trying to illuminate the tension between de-nationalization and re-nationalization of culture, creation and transgression of borders, reinterpretation of tradition and language.