Dr Sarah Arens
Postdoctoral Fellow September 2018 to 30 June 2019
Project: Of Medics and Missionaries: Translation, Science, and Empire in 20th‐ and 21st‐Century Francophone Writing
My research focuses broadly on themes of memory, (labour) migration, and space in literary and other cultural production from North and Sub-Saharan Africa, especially from Morocco and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. I also have a strong secondary research interest that focuses on the intersections of Postcolonial Theory and Jewish Studies across different languages and ‘unlikely’ geographical contexts. Following my PhD in French at the University of Edinburgh, which examined representations of the city of Brussels in Francophone postcolonial writing, I worked at the Universities of Bristol and St Andrews. I’ve also been a Volunteer Translator at the Wiener Library for the Study of the Holocaust and Genocide in London since 2015. My research has been published in, for instance, Research in African Literatures and Textyles, and I’m currently co-editing a special issue of the Irish Journal for French Studies (2019) with Joe Ford.
At IASH, I am working on the first phase of my new project, which focuses on medicine and translation as a pathway to better understanding the ideologies that fuelled Belgian colonialism and the resistance against it by investigating the creation of literary and scientific archives.