Esperança Bielsa is Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and Adjunct Professor at Shanghai International Studies University. 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 is author of The Latin American Urban Crónica (Lexington Books 2006) and of Cosmopolitanism and Translation (Routledge 2016), and co-author of Translation in Global News (Routledge 2009). She is editor of The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Media (forthcoming), and co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Globalization (2021) and of Globalization, Political Violence and Translation (2009). She is co-editor of the new interdisciplinary journal Translation in Society.

Research interests

Esperança Bielsa’s interdisciplinary research draws upon sociology, critical theory and translation studies. Recent research dealt with the central significance of translation for an understanding of contemporary cosmopolitanism, developing empirical perspectives on the translation of world literature, social theory and foreign news. Current research is focused on two areas. The first relates to the political and social dimensions of translation, as well as the theoretical and methodological implications of translation for sociology. This is the subject of a book project entitled Translation and Sociology. The second investigates the significance of authenticity in relation to strangeness as a fundamental characteristic of contemporary globalization. This research explores different, usually unconnected domains, from crowd theory or authenticity in art, to notions of linguistic authenticity in multilingual contexts.

Keywords

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