Esperança Bielsa is Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. She holds a PhD and an MA from Glasgow University. Before joining the UAB with a Ramón y Cajal Fellowship in 2010, she was Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Leicester. She has also held positions as Research Fellow at Warwick University, and as Research Fellow and Sociology Tutor at Glasgow University. She is author of The Latin American Urban Crónica (Lexington Books 2006) and of Cosmopolitanism and Translation (Routledge 2016), co-author of Translation in Global News (Routledge 2009), and co-editor of Globalisation, Political Violence and Translation (Palgrave Macmillan 2009).

Research interests

Esperança Bielsa’s interdisciplinary research draws upon sociology, critical theory and translation studies. Recent work has aimed to reveal the central importance of translation for an understanding of contemporary cosmopolitanism, focusing on the development of theoretical and methodological issues as well as on empirical research on the translation of literature, social theory and foreign news. Current research investigates the cultural and political significance of authenticity in relation to strangeness as a fundamental characteristic of contemporary globalisation. This research explores different, usually unconnected domains, from the performance of authenticity in different forms of contemporary political discourse, to notions of linguistic authenticity and identity in contexts of multilingualism and superdiversity.

Keywords

authenticity, cosmopolitanism, identity, sociology of culture, sociology of translation, stranger, translation