Faculty
Cotter, Sean
Assistant Professor , LIT
Office: JO 5.106
Phone: 972-883-2037
Email: sean.cotter@utdallas.edu
Areas of Specialization: Translation Studies, International Modernism, Romanian Literature.
Education: PhD, University of Michigan, 2004
MA, University of Texas at Dallas, 1998
BA, Loyola University, New Orleans, 1993
Dr. Sean Cotter is a scholar of translation and a widely published translator; he is interested in cultural transformation through translation, international literary movements, and author migrations. Dr. Cotter focuses on the twentieth century and European, East European, and traveling American authors. Dr. Cotter's work as a translator is to find and create points of communication between Romanian poetry and the American. His background in twentieth-century American literature, from the currents of international Modernism to contemporary poetry, has allowed him to create connections between Romanian and English-language poetry, a process he detailed in the introductions to Goldsmith Market and Lightwall. Dr. Cotter's critical studies of translators in Romania are an inevitable result of his translation activity. The complexities of Romanian literary history and its Latin, Slavic, and Turkish language influences, evident in any text he translates, have drawn him to study the culture more generally. His current book project examines Romanian modernist translators, centered on the most important cultural change of Romania's twentieth century: its colonization by the Soviet Union after World War II. Parts of this work will soon be or have been published. His reading of a 1958 translation of T. S. Eliot into Romanian details the translator's conscious use of Eliot's poetry to express dissident opinions. His META article argues two points: one, that this period of colonization is best understood as a kind of translation, and therefore best studied through the work of the translators involved, and two, that the particularities of Romania's case help us to move beyond stereotypical readings of translation and power. Dr. Cotter's current book project advances this case more broadly: the works of the poet Lucian Blaga and the philosophers Constantin Noica and E.M. Cioran, are best understood when read from the perspective of their work as translators, and the results of these readings make important contributions to attempts to read translators and translations.