Associate Professor Rita Wilson
Associate Professor and Convenor, Translation and Interpreting Studies
Qualifications
- B.A. Hons (Witwatersrand)
- Teach. Dip. (Perugia)
- M.A. (Witwatersrand)
- Ph. D. (Witwatersrand)
Research fields and areas of supervision
- Translation studies
Literary Translation; Translators in Fiction; Intercultural Studies; Self-Translation; Translation and Intertextuality; Translation and Interpreting Training - Contemporary Italian Literature and Culture
She has published on avant-garde poetry, Italo Calvino, Antonio Tabucchi, women writers of the 1980s and 1990s and urban fiction. - Comparative Literature
New and recent (auto)biographical fictions by Italian and Italo-Australian women writers. This research combines literary and cultural theories, and accentuates the complex relationship between gender and cultural history in the construction of identity. Writing for new media and multimodal texts. - European Studies
Current research examines how changing use of border spaces in contemporary narrative constructs or records new or unrecognized areas of spatial identification and mobility and, in so doing, provides space for an/other vision of European identity.
Supervision
Completed PhD Theses
2008, Gerber Leah, Tracing a Tradition: The translation of Australian children's fiction into German from 1945 to the present (associate supervisor)
2008, Maher, Brigid, Jest and Recreation: The translation of humour (main supervisor)Completed MA Research Theses
2005, Kristoffersen, Victoria, Tales in Translation: A study of the German editions of the Kinder-und Hausmärchen and their translation into EnglishCurrent PhD Supervision Topics
- Translation of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s Il Gattopardo (1958), with a study of linguistic and cultural questions arising from the translation
- “Speaking Migration”: Cultural Identities, Translation, and Interpreting
- Contemporary Australian writing in Italian translation.
- Peeling the Onion: Intertextuality in the German translations of Terry Pratchett
- The Unspeakable / Invisible Genre: Defining modern Italian Lesbian Literature
- The translation of Malay Pantun into English
- “Who owns haiku?”: an investigation of the relationship between Japanese and English language haiku
- Translating a nation: The media's exercise of translation in projecting Indonesia's cultural and political identity
- Strategies for translating metaphor in English translations of Japanese short fiction
- New storiatellers: Exploring the gaze of contemporary Italian female filmmakers
Current MA Supervision Topics
- Translation and Modernity in Late Qing and Early Republican China (1897-1932) (joint supervisor)
- The use of digression as a narrative device in historical fiction by Italian women writers
Selected Publications
Book
Speculative Identities: Contemporary Italian Women's Narrative. Leeds , Northern Universities Press, 2000.
Edited Volumes
Power to the Profession. Proceedings of the AUSIT/ASLIA Biennial National Conference 23-24 Oct. 2004. Melbourne, 2006. 260pp.
(with Susanna Scarparo) Across Genres, Generations and Borders: Italian Women Writing Lives . Newark : University of Delaware Press, 2004.
Chapters in Books
On the Margins: Antonio Tabucchi’s Investigative Reflections. In Deceptions, Deceits and Desires. Edited by Mirna Cicioni and Nicoletta Ciolla McGowan. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008: 13-25.
Paola Capriolo’s Mythic Fantasies. In The Italian Gothic and Fantastic: Encounters and Rewritings of Narrative Traditions. Edited by Francesca Billiani and Gigliola Sulis. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2007: 210-226.
Location, Location, Location: the Topos of the House in Italian Women’s Writing. Women's Writing in Western Europe: Gender and Generation, Edited by Adalgisa Giorgio and Julia Waters. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007: 331-46.
Cultural (re)locations: narratives by contemporary Italian-Australian women. In Literary and Social Diasporas. An Italian Australian Perspective. Edited by Gaetano Rando and Gerry Turcotte. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2007: 147-164.
(with Susanna Scarparo) Imagining Homeland in Anna Maria Dell’Oso’s Autofictions. In Across Genres, Generations and Borders: Italian Women Writing Lives. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004: 169-182.
Articles
Excuse me is our heritage showing? Representations of diasporic experiences across the generations, Fulgor (Flinders University Languages Group Online Review) 3(3) November 2008: 98-112. Available at http://ehlt.flinders.edu.au/deptlang/fulgor/
The Fiction of the Translator, Journal of Intercultural Studies, 28(4) 2007: 381-395. Locating the Other: Antonio Tabucchi’s Narratives of Cultural Identities, Culture, Theory, and Critique, 48(1) 2007: 51-69.Eco Effects, Meanjin, Special Issue ‘On Translation’,64(4) 2005: 119-123.
Refashioning the South: Fabrizia Ramondino's Narrative Spaces, Spunti e Ricerche, Vol. 19, Supplement: Essays in Modern Italian and French Literature, 2004: 117-133.
(with Vivian Gerrand) Fra tradizione e sperimentazione: tecniche narrative nei racconti di Paola Capriolo e Carmen Covito, Studi d'italianistica nell'Africa australe/Italian Studies in Southern Africa, 17(1) 2004: 7-29.
Research Reports
(with Leah Gerber) The Current and Future Provision of Language Services to the Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Ageing Population in Victoria. Report prepared for VITS Language Link, December 2007, 58pp.
(with Leah Gerber) Where are they now? Employment and training outcomes for graduate students of Bilingual Worker, Translating and Interpreting courses in Victoria. Report prepared for Victorian Multicultural Commission, March 2007, 46 pp.
(with Leah Gerber) Basic Interpreting Skills Training. Coordination of Basic Interpreting Skills Training for Potential Interpreters in Small and Emerging Community Languages. Report prepared for AMEP, Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs, December 2006, 49pp.
(with Denise Formica and Danielle Rossi) The Status of Teaching of Italian and Italy-linked Subjects in the Education and Research Sectors and Relevant Library Holdings within Australia. Report prepared for Italian Trade Commission, Sydney, April 2006, 89 pp.
(with Brigid Maher and Victoria Kristoffersen) Developing Basic Interpreting Skills Training for Potential Interpreters in Small and Emerging Community Language. Report prepared for Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs, January 2006, 46 pp. + database on CD-ROM.
(with Leah Gerber, Victoria Kristoffersen, Juliet Zhao) Pathways to Interpreting and Translating. Report prepared for Victorian Office of Multicultural Affairs, Department for Victorian Communities, July 2005, 148 pp.
Contact Details
- Clayton Campus: W316
- Email: Rita.Wilson@arts.monash.edu.au
- Phone: 9905 5825
- Fax: 9905 5437
- Inquiries: 9905 2223 / 9905 2281