Panel Discussion: The Political Economy of Translation

What is the place of translation in the contemporary literary system? In what relation is the funding and publication of translation to contemporary geopolitical events? How do literary institutions, including universities, value the labor of translation? How do we conceive of translation as a mode of authorship? We asked our three panelists—acclaimed translators who translate from/into Bosnian, Farsi and Arabic—to answer these questions and others and engage in conversation with each other and the audience.

Panelists

Mona Kareem (left) is an assistant professor of Arabic literature at Washington University in St Louis. She is the author of four poetry collections and the translator of Ra'ad Abdul Qadir, Octavia Butler, and Ashraf Fayadh. 

AJ Javaheri (center) is an Iranian born and raised literary translator, translating to and from English, Farsi and Kurdish. She holds an MFA in Literary Translation from the university of Iowa and she is currently a second year PhD student in Comparative Literature, International Writers Track, at WashU. Her focus is translating contemporary Iranian literature, mainly fiction and poetry, from Farsi.

Ena Selimović (right) is a writer and translator. She received her PhD in Comparative Literature from WashU in 2020. Her work has appeared in Words Without Borders, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Paris Review. She has been awarded fellowships from the American Literary Translators Association, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her most recent translation is Maša Kolanović's Underground Barbie (Sandorf Passage, 2025).