Campus News

NEH funds translation projects in Romance languages, classics

Two projects by scholars at UGA have received funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities in its Scholarly Editions and Translations program.

Amélia Hutchinson of the department of Romance languages received a three-year grant of $170,000 for “Fernão Lopes Translation Project: The Chronicles.” This is a translation and annotation of four medieval Portuguese chronicles written by Lopes, a 15th-century royal chronicler who recorded momentous events affecting Portugal and other countries in Western Europe. Lopes also offers the modern reader what Hutchinson calls “a surprisingly detailed and humane picture of the common people and their struggle for survival. This publication will be a landmark in medieval studies, as Lopes is a main source on the period, and now his work will be accessible in English, the lingua franca of our age.”

Elizabeth Wright, also of the department of Romance languages, received a two-year grant of $90,000 for her project, “Crosscurrents and Confluences: An Annotated Edition and Translation of Latin Poetry on the Battle of Lepanto (1571).”

This is a joint project with Sarah Spence, who is a Distinguished Research Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at UGA.

Hutchinson has been at UGA since 1998 and served as supervisor for Portuguese language since 2001 and as lecturer in Portuguese since 2003. She is the author of scholarly articles on medieval studies and language books such as Ponto de Encontro: Portuguese as a World Language, which she co-authored with Anna Klobucka, former associate professor at UGA. This is the first multimedia Portuguese language course on the market, Hutchinson said, already adopted by more than 70 American colleges and universities.

Spence’s research fields include classical Latin poetry, medieval vernacular poetry and rhetoric. She is the author of many books, including Figuratively Speaking: Rhetoric and Culture from Quintilian to the Twin Towers.

In her research, Wright analyzes a diverse array of writing practices from early modern Spain (1492-1800) with particular emphasis on theater and epic poetry, the genres which ground her 2001 book, Pilgrimage to Patronage: Lope de Vega and the Court of Philip III, 1598-1621. She has been part of the faculty at UGA since 1998.