Ms Alexa Alfer
Alexa is Assistant Head of the School of Humanities and Principal Lecturer in Translation Studies. Educated at Berlin, Dublin, and London, Alexa's background is in English and German Literature. In addition to her academic work, she has many years of experience as a professional translator and editor, specialising in academic translation (literary criticism, philosophy, art, art history, history of medicine). From 2007 to 2009, Alexa also held a part-time Research Assistantship with the School of Historical Studies at Newcastle University, where she contributed her translation criticism expertise to a research project on the intersections of literary and medical discourses in the works of Thomas Mann. She is the co-founder of the Westminster-based Translaborate research group, which Alexa now runs together with Cornelia Zwischenberger (University of Vienna).
Alexa's research focuses on the intersections of translation theory and literary criticism. She is particularly interested in realism and its theorisations, as well as in the 'translational turn' in cultural studies and the wider humanities and social sciences. Alexa is the co-author (with Amy J. Edwards) of *A. S. Byatt: Critical Storytelling* (Manchester UP, 2010) and is currently working on articles exploring, among other things, translational labour, translational hermeneutics, and conceptualisations of translation as collaboration.