Notes on Contributors
Tahoor Ali is a Ph.D. student at the International Islamic University, Islamabad, and a Lecturer in Literary Studies at the University of Central Punjab, Lahore. His research interests include South Asian literature, critical theory, translation studies, and modern and contemporary fiction. Currently, he is working on topics related to soft power, the cultural Cold War, and the Franklin Book Programs in Pakistan.
Hanna Blum is Lecturer at the Department of Translation Studies in Graz. Her main research areas are the translation culture of the GDR, with a focus on the “alltagsgeschichte” of translators and interpreters in East Germany, which was also the topic of her Ph.D. thesis, and postcolonial translation studies. Recent publications include “The Impact of Cultural Policy in the GDR on the Work of Translators” (2022) in Translation under Communism (ed. by Ch. Rundle, A. Lange, and D. Monticelli).
Deborah Cohn is Provost Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Indiana University Bloomington. She is the author of The Latin American Literary Boom and U.S. Nationalism during the Cold War (Vanderbilt UP) and History and Memory in the Two Souths: Recent Southern and Spanish American Fiction (Vanderbilt UP), as well as coeditor, with Hilary Kahn, of International Education at the Crossroads (Indiana UP), and, with Jon Smith, of Look Away! The U.S. South in New World Studies (Duke UP). She has also published in the ADFL Bulletin (forthcoming), The Conversation, Diplomatic History, Diplomatica, Mississippi Quarterly, Southern Quarterly, and more.
Cécile Cottenet is Professor of American Studies at Aix-Marseille Université (France). Her interest in publishing history extends beyond the domestic US sphere, to focus on transatlantic, Franco-American book networks. She has authored several articles on literary agents, and a monograph on the French literary agent Michel Hoffman (Literary Agents in the Transatlantic Book Trade: American Fiction, French Rights, and the Hoffman Agency, 2017). She is the principal instigator of the “Dictionnaire des passeurs de la littérature des États-Unis” (DicoPaLitUS), a collaborative project foregrounding the role of intermediaries in the importation, publication, and translation of US literature into France in the 20th century.
Alexander Erokhin is Professor at the Department of English, Kalashnikov Izhevsk State Technical University (Russia). He has more than 200 publications on literary history, comparative literary and translation studies. Recent publications include “Cold War literary modernists in a dialogue under oppression: Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Andrei Voznesensky in Anglo-American translations during and after the Thaw” in Translation and Interpreting Studies and “Dostoevsky in the Assessment of Walter Benjamin” in Bulletin of Tomsk State University Philology. His main research interest is the history of world literature in its comparative aspects, especially concerning the relationship between English-language, German and Russian literature.
Esmaeil Haddadian-Moghaddam received his Ph.D. from Rovira i Virgili University (2012). He is an independent scholar based in Belgium and his most recent project, funded by the Gerda Henkel Foundation, explores the Book Translation Program of the United States Information Agency (USIA) in Iran and Afghanistan. He is the co-editor of the special issue, “Translation and the Cultural Cold War” (Translation and Interpreting Studies, 2020), the recipient of Marie Skłodowska Curie Individual Fellowship (2019–2022; Leiden University) and the author of Literary Translation in Modern Iran: A Sociological Study (Benjamins, 2014).
Musa Igrek is an independent scholar and researcher. He has worked as an arts and culture journalist for more than a decade, between Istanbul and London. He holds a Ph.D. from Goldsmiths, University of London and an MA from Sheffield Hallam University.
Rósa Magnúsdóttir is Professor of History at the University of Iceland. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the author of Enemy Number One: The United States of America in Soviet Ideology and Propaganda, 1945–1959 (Oxford UP, 2019), a biography of Icelandic Stalinists (Forlagið, 2021), and numerous articles on Soviet-American cultural relations, the cultural Cold War, and Communist lives. Together with Birgitte Beck Pristed, she is working on a Soviet-American publishing relations during the late Cold War.
Christos Mais is a cultural and publishing studies expert based in Thessaloniki, Greece. He is a teaching fellow at the Department of Culture, Creative Media and Industries of the University of Thessaly and since 2019 he is the co-founder and senior advisor of Psifides Publishing. His research interests vary from oral, social, and cultural history to publishing and cultural studies. He is currently working on the status of the contemporary publishing sector in Greece and Cyprus with a special interest in publishing concerning cultural policies and the publishing sector as part of the cultural economy.
Hafiz Abid Masood is an Assistant Professor at the Department of English, International Islamic University, Islamabad. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Sussex, Brighton. His areas of interest include East-West literary encounters, Cultural Cold War, Book Diplomacy, and Anglo-Islamic relations. His research has appeared in the Journal of Contemporary Poetics, Forum Iatlicum, and IQAN: A Bi-Annual Research Journal of Islamic Studies.
Mila Milani is Associate Professor in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at the University of Warwick, serving as Head of Translation and Transcultural Studies between 2017 and 2022. Her research specialism is sociology of translation intertwined with cultural history, particularly Italian post-WWII History of Publishing and Intellectual History. Her most recent publications (Translation Studies; Italian Studies; Modern Italy; Journal of Modern Italian Culture) focus on national and transnational networks of intellectuals in post-war Italy; her latest monograph, Publishing Contemporary Foreign Poetry: Transnational Exchange in the Italian Publishing Field, 1939–1977, was published by Liverpool University Press in 2023.
Birgitte Beck Pristed is Associate Professor in Russian Studies at the Department of Global Studies, Aarhus University, Denmark. She holds a Ph.D. from the Johannes-Gutenberg-University of Mainz, Germany, awarded with distinction 2014. She is author of The New Russian Book. A Graphic Cultural History (Palgrave, 2017) and numerous articles on print culture, book publishing, and children’s books of the Soviet and post-Soviet eras. Her current major research projects focus on children’s book publishing in the Russia-Ukraine war, and in cooperation with Rósa Magnúsdóttir, Soviet-American publishing relations during the late Cold War.
Giles Scott-Smith is Professor of Transnational Relations and New Diplomatic History at Leiden University, and Dean of Leiden University College. He is one of the organizers of the New Diplomatic History network and founding editor of the network’s publication Diplomatica: A Journal of Diplomacy and Society (Brill). His research covers a broad range of fields around public / cultural diplomacy and citizen diplomats.
Illaria Sicari Ilaria Sicari is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie postdoc research grant holder based at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, with a project titled: “Transnational Book Diplomacy beyond the Cultural Cold War: Towards a Socio-Cultural History of the Tamizdat.” Ilaria is a visiting scholar at Stanford University where she is affiliated with the Center for Russian, Eastern European and Eurasian Studies (CREEES) and with the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA). Her research interests range from Comparative literature to Translation studies, Reception studies, Cultural and Intellectual history. In the Slavonic field, she is interested in Soviet and Eastern European literary institutions, censorship, cultural policies, unofficial literature (samizdat and tamizdat) and cultural diplomacy
Julia Lin Thompson completed her Ph.D. in the Department of Spanish and Latin American Studies at the University of Sydney, where she also obtained her MA degree. Her research interest focuses on translation, children’s literature, book censorship, and book history in Francoist Spain and post-1949 China. Her recent book, included in Palgrave Macmillan’s “Languages at War” series, is titled Censorship and Ideology: The Translation of Children’s Literature in Post-Civil War Spain. Her current project investigates the translation of children’s literature in China during the Cold War.
Steven W. Witt is a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. At Illinois, he serves as both head of the International and Area Studies Library and Director of the Center for Global Studies. Witt is also the editor of IFLA Journal, which is the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions flagship publication. His research is focused on the role of libraries and transnational book distribution networks in shaping global public opinion and cultural diplomacy during the 20th century, particularly in the context of internationalism and the interwar period. His work examines the intersection of library science, history, and international relations, highlighting how philanthropic organizations like the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace used books as tools of public diplomacy.