Student Travel Grants
The Center for Translation and Global Literacy gives annual Student Travel Grants to outstanding University of Iowa undergraduate or graduate students to support travel associated with translation projects, translation-related research projects, or community engagement projects involving translation.
Graduate Assistantships
Two graduate assistantships are available in the CTGL each year. One assistantship is provided for a graduate student admitted to the MFA in Literary Translation, and a second assistantship for a graduate student in the College of Education. The assistantships are an excellent opportunity for University of Iowa graduate students to gain experience in a variety of skills, including program planning, public relations, curatorial or production assistance, and web- and print-based editing.
Please communicate your interest in an assistantship with Aron Aji, CTGL program director, early in spring semester (February 1) for the following academic year.
2022-23 Student Travel Grant Recipients
Sofía Balbuena
Balbuena spent a month in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, interviewing artists and activists and doing research in public libraries. She is working on a creative writing project aimed at reducing the misrepresentation of Caribbean literature and bringing attention to the current state of Caribbean literature in Spanish and English language.
Jordan Barger
Barger traveled to Norway to study the manuscripts of Sigbjørn Obstfelder in the archives of Edvard Munch. Obstfelder and Munch were both figures in the 1890s artistic scene known as the Kristiania Bohème.
Tony Santi
Before attending university, Santi served five years in the U.S. Army as an Arabic Cryptologic Linguist. Via this grant, he traveled to Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, where he researched and translated Sonallah Ibrahim's novel Life and Death in a Colorful Sea. He conducted interviews with divers and marine biologists about Arabic marine-life vocabulary and collected data on the on-going changes to the coral reefs. In addition to the translation, Santi will write a series of essays on the translation process and firsthand experiences in and around the Red Sea.
Melanie Carbine
Carbine began her teaching career in the Marshall Islands, where she learned the Marshallese language. Carbine traveled to Springdale, Arkansas, to work in collaboration with the Marshallese Consulate for the Continental U.S. She is developing a resource specific to professional development for translators, including interpretation standards, domain-specific terms, and a grammatical guide for English to Marshallese translation.
Ilie Shirin
Shirin, who is German-Afghani, hosted a writer’s and translator’s workshop in Berlin, Germany. The participants had personal or family migration history to Germany and explored that movement through writing in all kind of genres and languages, including Arabic, Romanian, Polish, Serbian, Korean, Farsi, Portuguese, Malay and Belursian. The participants' stories will be translated in many different languages to connect people with all sorts of language and cultural background.