International Center for Writing & Translation

ICWT logo

About the Center

International Center for Writing & Translation

The International Center for Writing & Translation, founded in 2002, promotes research related to translation as a literary, creative, linguistic, philosophical, and/or intellectual endeavor. The Center’s understanding of translation is thus not limited to movement between and across languages but as a practice across spaces, modalities, and knowledges. We support this work through fellowships, scholarships, grants, and events. 

 

ICWT Director

I am honored to serve as the Director of the International Center for Writing and Translation, particularly in an institutional context such as UCI, with its proud history of scholarly and literary activity related to and founded on the promise of translation. Please browse our site to learn about the ways we have been supporting translation-related scholarship at UCI and beyond while also leveraging the capacities of translation, broadly conceived, to support the future of humanities work. 

Jerry Won Lee
Director, UCI International Center for Writing & Translation

The İCWṬ logo background resembles a silhouette of Africa, in honor of Founding Director Emeritus Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (1938-2025), former Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at UCI, and his scholarship and activism in support of African languages. Since the mission of the İCWṬ is to support writing and translation work beyond English, the logo’s wordmark deliberately employs two letters not found in English: İ and Ṭ, the former occurring in Turkic languages and the latter found in the Mizo language and in transcriptions of various Afro-Asiatic languages. Their bookended usage in the wordmark creates a near parallelism, symbolizing the communicative but also aesthetic affordances of translation but also an acknowledgement of the inherent limitations of translation, particularly in the pursuit of one-to-one translational equivalence. Finally, the placement of both dots is meaningful. The dot of the İ points to Algeria, the homeland of former UCI Professor Jacques Derrida (1930-2004), in honor of his lasting contributions to language and translation scholarship. The dot of the Ṭ points to Ngũgĩ’s homeland of Kenya.

 

Director:

Jerry Won Lee

Founding Director Emeritus:

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o

Faculty Advisory Board:

  • Annalisa Coliva (Philosophy)
  • Touraj Daryaee (History)
  • Margaux Fitoussi (Comparative Literature)
  • Hu Ying (East Asian Studies)
  • Adriana Johnson (Comparative Literature / Spanish & Portuguese)
  • André Keiji Kunigami (Film & Media Studies)
  • Daphne Lei (Drama)
  • Rudo Mudiwa (Gender & Sexuality Studies)
  • R. Radhakrishnan (English)
  • Eraldo Souza dos Santos (Criminology, Law & Society)
  • Serk-Bae Suh (East Asian Studies)
  • Monica Youn (English)