Dr Cosima Bruno

Dr Cosima Bruno 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. 

My research interests lie in contemporary Sinophone poetry and translation. I believe that literature, like all the arts, has the power to bring us closer to possible worlds and to help us cross the ridgeline of our own. 

My research to date has been shaped by three principal aims. The first is to explore the role of translation and other forms of cultural mediation in the evolution, contestation, and renegotiation of literary authority and power. Within this aim, I engaged with ecopoetics and bilingual migrant literature. The second aim is to examine inter-arts transculturation and transmedia poetry. The third is to revise relational theories of literature and translation in order to provide new tools for a critical understanding of the literary work and its environment. 

My current project falls within the multidisciplinary field of sound studies and focuses on sound poetics in the Sinophone world. I aim to place sound, in its cultural and social resonance, at the heart of poetic experience, illuminating the tensions between denationalization and renationalization of culture, the creation and transgression of borders, and the reinterpretation of tradition and language.

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