Isabel C. Gómez (NHC Fellow, 2024–25)

Isabel C. Gómez is an associate professor in the Department of Latin American and Iberian Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston where her research and teaching focus on translation studies, Latin American and Latinx literatures and cultures, and contemporary poetics. Her first book Cannibal Translation: Literary Reciprocity in Contemporary Latin America (Northwestern University Press 2023) received the 2024 Harry Levin Prize awarded annually from the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) for the best first book in comparative literature. Recent publications can be found in Translation Review, the Journal of World Literature, Mutatis mutandis, Hispanic Journal, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Jacket2.

From 2020 to 2023, she served as the president of the Translation Studies Research Committee of the International Comparative Literature Association (ICLA); in this leadership capacity, she coedited the volume Translating Home in the Global South: Migration, Belonging, and Language Justice (Routledge 2024). A translator from Spanish and Portuguese, she is the translations editor at the Latin American Literary Review. Currently her research focuses on the intersection of climate activism and translingual poetics.

Selected Publications

• Gómez, Isabel C. Cannibal Translation: Literary Reciprocity in Contemporary Latin America. FlashPoints Series. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2023.
• Gómez, Isabel C. “A Puerto Rican Poetics of Disaster Relief and Cuir Eco-Translation.” In Translating Home in the Global South: Migration, Belonging, and Language Justice, edited by Isabel C. Gómez, and Marlene Hansen Esplin, 186–203. New York: Routledge, 2024.
• Gómez, Isabel C. “A Laboratory of Texts: The Multilingual Translation Legacies of Haroldo de Campos.” In The Routledge Handbook of Latin American Literary Translation Studies, edited by Denise Kripper, and Delfina Cabrera, 362–82. New York: Routledge, 2023.
• Gómez, Isabel C. “Building Language Justice: Translation Pedagogy and Spanish Heritage Language Learners.” Translation Review 106, no. 1 (2020): 50–68.
• Gómez, Isabel C. “Anti-Surrealism? Augusto de Campos ‘Untranslates’ Spanish-American Poetry.” Mutatis Mutandis 11, no. 2 Latinoamérica traducida: caminos y destinos de la literatura latinoamericana contemporánea entre las lenguas (2018): 376–99. Winner of LASA Brazil Section Best Article in Humanities “Antonio Candido” Prize (2019).