Carolyn Shread

Carolyn Shread is Senior Lecturer in French at Mount Holyoke College and every Spring since 2013 has taught as a faculty exchange at Smith College, where she sits on the advisory board of the Translation Studies Concentration. Her research areas include 20th-century and contemporary French and Francophone literature, with a special interest in Haitian literature and in women's writing. She is actively involved in the field of translation studies and is on the advisory board of the Nida FUSP Center for Advanced Research in Translation and is a member of the Eco-Translation Network. She has translated both scholarly and literary texts, and has written numerous articles on translation. Her translations include seven of contemporary French philosopher Catherine Malabou, including Pleasure Erased: The Clitoris Unthought, recipient of a 2022 French Voices Award. Shread has written on the intersection of translation and Malabou’s signature concept, plasticity, as well as introducing Bracha Ettinger’s psychoanalytic concept of metamorphosis as a means of rethinking translational paradigms with a feminist lens. She published multiple articles on her process translating Marie Vieux-Chauvet’s Les Rapaces is a longstanding collaborator with LEGS Édition, and is on the editorial board of the Haitian journal Legs et Littérature.

Selected Publications

“The Plasticity of Thought in Translation” Traduction, terminologie, rédaction 37:1, 19-41, 2024.

“‘El clítoris es un anarquista.’ Placeres, anarquismo y ecologías del orden plástico de la traducción” trans. Zamorano, R., Revista Papel Máquina 20, 27-41, 2024.

“Ecological Approaches,” in The Routledge Handbook of Concepts and Theories of Translation, Kobus Marais, Reine Meylaerts, eds., London and New York: Routledge, 2023.

“Love, Anger, Madness Making a Classic: Amplifying Marie Vieux-Chauvet’s Haitian Trilogy” in This is a Classic: Translators on Making Writers Global, ed. Regina Galasso, New York: Bloomsbury, 2023.

“This Time We Didn’t Wait: The Simultaneous English Translations of Simone de Beauvoir’s Les Inséparables,” Simone de Beauvoir Studies 33, 2022.

“Translating Art and Pleasure Unthought in Catherine Malabou”, Modern Language Notes, 137(4), ed. Hannes Opelz, 2023.

“Women (Re)Writing Authority: A Roundtable Discussion on Feminist Translation” Ergun et al. Translation, Feminism and Gender, Luise von Flotow and Hala Kamal, 2020.

“Translating Feminist Philosophers” in P. Rawling and P. Wilson (eds.) Routledge Handbook of Translation and Philosophy, London and New York: Routledge, 2018.

Selected Translations

Malabou, Catherine, trans. C. Shread Stop Thief! Anarchism and Philosophy, Polity Press, U.K. 2023.

Mbembe, Achille, trans. C. Shread The Universal Right to Breathe, Critical Inquiry In the Moment, April 13, 2020.  

Tadjo, Véronique, trans. C. Shread, Aimer: Fields of Battle, Fields of Love, The Massachusetts Review, 2019.

Malabou, Catherine, trans. C. Shread, Pleasure Erased: The Clitoris Unthought, Polity Press, U.K. 2022.