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 the author of A Translational Sociology (2023), Cosmopolitanism and Translation (2016) and The Latin American Urban Crónica (2006), and co-author of Translation in Global News (2009). She is editor of The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Media (2022), and co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Globalization (2021) and Globalization, Political Violence and Translation (2009). She is Editor of the new interdisciplinary Routledge series ‘Translation, Politics and Society’.

Research interests

Esperança Bielsa’s interdisciplinary work draws upon sociology, critical theory and translation studies. Her current research is focused on the social and political dimensions of translation and the theoretical and methodological implications of this research for sociology, as part of a broader translational turn in the social sciences and the humanities. She leads a nationally funded project entitled ‘Political translation’ in which an alternative conceptualization of the politics of translation is proposed and empirically tested in the field of academic translation. Recent and older research has dealt with a critique of authenticity in contemporary culture and politics, with the central significance of translation for an understanding of contemporary cosmopolitanism and its role in the production of global news, and with the Latin American urban crónica as a hybrid genre of the contact zone between popular culture and literature.

Keywords

cosmopolitanism, cultural sociology, social theory, stranger, translation, translational sociology