Ben Garceau

Picture of Ben Garceau
Lecturer, Humanities Core Program
School of Humanities
Ph.D., Indiana University, 2015, Comparative Literature
Ph.D., Indiana University, 2015, English
University of California, Irvine
185 Humanities Instructional Building
Mail Code: 3385
Irvine, CA 92697
Research Interests
Translation, Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, Critical Theory, Deconstruction, Hermeneutics, Classical Reception
Academic Distinctions
2017 UC-AFT Professional Development Award
2015 Andrea McRobbie Fellowship in Medieval History
2014 Indiana University Dissertation Completion Fellowship
2009 Teaching Fellowship at the Universite Paris X - Nanterre La Defense
Research Abstract
What can we learn from the Middle Ages? My research focuses on how ideas about translation in pre-modern Europe had broad effects on civil, religious, and political discourses. My dissertation, Untimely Inheritance: A Conceptual History of Translation in Early Medieval Europe focused on works in Latin and Old English, starting in Late Antiquity and ending with King Alfred of Wessex. These works demonstrate a constitutive bond in the early Middle Ages between theories of translation and eschatology, a bond that produced strange and symptomatic effects. I am currently revising this into a book manuscript, and I am also preparing new work on Old French and Middle English theories of translation in the later Middle Ages. I have become fascinated with connections between the rediscovery of Roman law codes in eleventh-century Italy, the rise of a lay bureaucratic class at various courts in Western Europe, and the simultaneous translation and deployment of beast literature in political handbooks, fables, and mock epics like the stories of Reynard the Fox.
Publications
"Passing Over, Passing On: Survivance in the Translations of Deor by Seamus Heaney and J. L. Borges,” PMLA 132.2 (March 2017).
“The Fidus Interpres and the Fact of Slavery: Rethinking Classical and Patristic Models of Translation,” Translation Studies (February 2018).
[co-authored with Shela Raman] "De-Centered Perspectives in the Translations of the Alfredian Circle," forthcoming in Global Perspectives on Anglo-Saxons and Anglo-Saxonisms (ACMRS)
Research Centers
Medieval Devysings
Last updated
10/21/2018