Carolyn Shread

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  • Senior Lecturer
Carolyn Shread

Carolyn Shread is committed to interrogating the canon to make space for marginalized voices and to decolonizing the curriculum through the inclusion of texts from throughout the Francophone world. Her language classes integrate digital practices, combining a focus on grammatical rigor with creative self-expression in French.

Shread’s research approaches the language and literature of the French speaking world primarily through the lens of translation studies. She has published twelve books in translation, including seven by contemporary French philosopher Catherine Malabou, including Pleasure Erased: The Clitoris Unthought, recipient of a French Voices 2022 award. Shread has published articles on Bracha Ettinger’s psychoanalytic concept of metramorphosis as a means of rethinking translational paradigms with a feminist lens, her translation of Marie Vieux-Chauvet’s Les Rapaces, and the intersection of Malabou’s signature concept plasticity and translation.

In addition to teaching at Smith College as a faculty exchange since 2013, Shread participates actively in the Five College community as co-chair for the Faculty Seminar on Literary Translation, the French Studies Faculty Seminar, and the new Faculty Seminar Translate Together! She is on the Advisory Board of the FUSP Nida Centre for Advanced Research on Translation.

Areas of Expertise

Language teaching, twentieth and twenty-first century French and Francophone literature and culture, translation studies, women and gender studies

Education

  • Ph.D., M.A., University of Massachusetts Amherst
  • M.A., Sussex University
  • B.A., St. Anne's College, Oxford

Happening at Mount Holyoke

Recent Campus News

Ƶstudents and faculty, through the Five College Consortium, have access to limitless opportunities.

Who is translating and which text they choose are political decisions, says Carolyn Shread, a lecturer in the French department at Mount Holyoke.

Recent Publications

Malabou, C. & Shread, C. (trans.) (2023) Stop Thief! Anarchism and Philosophy, Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

Shread, C. (2023) “Ecological Approaches,” in The Routledge Handbook of Concepts and Theories of Translation, Kobus Marais, Reine Meylaerts, eds., London and New York: Routledge, 113-125.

Shread, C. “This Time We Didn’t Wait: The Simultaneous English Translations of Simone de Beauvoir’s Les Inséparables,” Simone de Beauvoir Studies 33 (2022) 167–176.

Shread, C. (2023) “Love, Anger, Madness Making a Classic: Amplifying Marie Vieux-Chauvet’s Haitian Trilogy” in This is a Classic: Translators on Making Writers Global, ed. Regina Galasso, New York: Bloomsbury, 215-236.

Shread, C. (2022) “Translating Art and Pleasure Unthought in Catherine Malabou”, Modern Language Notes, 137(4), Special Issue: L’Art de Malabou: Discours, Plasticité, Mimèsis, ed. Hannes Opelz, 737-754.

Recent Awards

Forthcoming translation from the French of Catherine Malabou's Pleasure Erased: The Clitoris Unthought is the recipient of a 2022 French Voices award.

Recent Honors

Shread, C. Round table panelist “Traduire et éditer le genre » Babelica, Alliance internationale des éditeurs indépendants, online 21 September, 2023

Shread, C. Invited keynote speaker at the 35th Annual Conference of the Canadian Association for Translation Studies: "Plasticity of Thought in Translation" 29 May 2023

Invited speaker for Mellon Sawyer Seminar Building Translation Networks with Hathi Trust. University of Michigan. Talk entitled: "Translation Anarchy" December 7, 2022

Invited speaker at Séminaire d’axe 4 Traduction et médiation at the the Université de Lille, France, where she gave a presentation online entitled "Penser la plasticité en traduction" on November 30, 2022.

Gave a guest lecture, “The Pleasure of Translating Catherine Malabou”, at Séminaire Climas Intersections, Université de Bordeaux Montaigne, France, on 22 October 2021

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