Lauren K. Wolfe

Lauren holds a B.A. in German Cultural Studies from Grinnell College, an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and an M.A. in Comparative Literature from New York University. She has taught courses in composition (SAIC), translation (University of Illinois), and comparative literature (NYU). She is a founding editorial collective member of Barricade: A Journal of Anti-Fascism and Translation. 

Her dissertation takes an experimental, material approach to translation, foregrounding language’s prosodic elements (rhythm, intonation, tempo), as well as the paralinguistic and performative aspects of speech as inscribed in the written text, thus proposing the body as a meaningful unit of translation and the enunciating subject as an axis of transmissibility and commensurability along which texts, languages and cultures encounter one another in their alterity. 

Lauren’s published translations from the German include inter alia Werner Kofler’s Treblinka Café (Barricade 2018); Ernst Kapp’s Elements of a Philosophy of Technology (University of Minnesota Press 2018); Werner Kofler’s At the Writing Desk (Dalkey Archive Press 2016); Modern and Contemporary Swiss Poetry: An Anthology, in collaboration with Reinhard Mayer (Dalkey Archive Press 2012). She also translates contemporary media- and art-theoretical scholarship on a freelance basis.