Dr Joanna Rzepa

Biography

Joanna Rzepa is Senior Lecturer in Literature in the Department of Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies. Before joining Essex in 2019, she held the post of Thomas Brown Assistant Professor in the School of Languages, Literatures and Cultural Studies, Trinity College Dublin, she was an Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow at the Trinity Long Room Hub, Arts & Humanities Research Institute, and an early career fellow at the Warwick Institute of Advanced Study. She also taught at the University of Warwick and University College London. Joanna's research and teaching interests include comparative literature and cultural theory, modernism and twentieth-century literature, book history and print culture, Holocaust writing and testimony, literary translation, literature and politics, cultural and intellectual history, and literature and religion. Joanna's current book project, "Holocaust Writing in Translation: Publishing Testimonies from East-Central Europe" (under contract with Cambridge University Press), is situated at the juncture of book history, Holocaust studies, and translation studies. It investigates the transnational dissemination of testimonial literature by foregrounding the role of publishers and translators who made it possible for survivors’ narratives to reach global readership through English-language translations. It tells a story of how the changing nature of the literary marketplace, translation practice, and politics has shaped the publishing of Holocaust writing from World War 2 until the present day. Joanna's first monograph, "Modernism and Theology: Rainer Maria Rilke, T. S. Eliot, Czesław Miłosz" (Palgrave Macmillan 2021), is the first book-length study to examine the interface between literary and theological modernisms. It provides a comprehensive account of literary responses to the modernist crisis in Christian theology from a transnational and interdenominational perspective. It offers a cultural history of the period, considering a wide range of literary and historical sources, including novels, drama, poetry, literary criticism, encyclicals, theological and philosophical treatises, periodical publications, and wartime propaganda. By contextualising literary modernism within the cultural, religious, and political landscape, the book reveals fundamental yet largely forgotten connections between literary and theological modernisms. Joanna's articles have appeared in 'Modernism/modernity', 'Comparative Critical Studies', 'Translation Studies', and other leading journals. In 2020, she won the Martha Cheung Award for Best English Article in Translation Studies by an Early Career Scholar funded by the Baker Centre for Translation and Intercultural Studies, Shanghai International Studies University, for her article on the translations of Jan Karski's 'Story of a Secret State' (published in 'Translation Studies', 11.3, 2018). Joanna would welcome PhD applications in the following areas: • modernism, twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature • comparative literature • twentieth-century print culture • Holocaust writing • literature and religion • literary translation

Qualifications

• PhD in English and Comparative Literary Studies University of Warwick,

Appointments

University of Essex

• Senior Lecturer in Literature, Department of Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies, University of Essex (10/2021 - present)

• Lecturer in Literature, Department of Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies, University of Essex (1/1/2019 - 30/9/2021)

Other academic

• Thomas Brown Assistant Professor, School of Languages, Literatures and Cultural Studies, Trinity College Dublin (2017 - 2018)

• Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow, Trinity Long Room Hub: Arts and Humanities Research Institute, Trinity College Dublin (2016 - 2017)

• Early Career Fellow, Institute of Advanced Study, University of Warwick (2015 - 2016)