This conference explores translation as a dynamic process shaping cultural, social, and legal exchanges. Beyond linguistic adaptation, translation involves the transformation of meanings, norms, and discourses across different contexts. From avant-garde movements to feminist activism and legal transplants, translation is an interactive and often contested process influenced by power hierarchies and historical legacies.

Focusing on transregional entanglements – with contributions addressing the Americas, Western, Southern, and Eastern Europe, and Central Asia – the conference brings together scholars from multiple disciplines. The panels will address themes including travelling concepts and knowledge transfer in legal, political and cultural discourses and practices, narrating identities and the struggle for representation, and contestations over artistic movements.

The keynote speakers will take up these themes, with Liliana Gómez addressing encounters between art, witnesses and civil society in the courtrooms of Balkan and Latin American (post)conflict societies. Lauri Mälksoo will examine role of international treaties in East-West relations, exploring the longer history of treaties involving Russia and European nations. A panel discussion on Area Studies as the Art and Science of Translation provides context for considering the central themes of the conference within an area studies framework. This field is crucial to the research done in Regensburg on the theoretical and empirical dimensions of translation and transfer in an interconnected world marked by frictions and turbulence.

The event marks the concluding conference of the first funding phase (2019–25) and the opening of the second phase (2024–28) of the ScienceCampus.

#navigating25

Programme
Wednesday, 23 April 2025
H24, Vielberth Building, University of Regensburg

16:00 Welcome Addresses
Udo Hebel (President of the University of Regensburg)
Ulf Brunnbauer (Director of the Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies (IOS), Regensburg)
Cindy Wittke (IOS) and Anne Brüske (University of Regensburg; Conference co-organizers)

16:30 Keynote 1 | Witnesses in Art: Aesthetics, archives, and (non)institutional practices in transition
Liliana Gómez (Kassel)

17:30 Award of the 2025 Regensburg Area Studies Prize
Presented by Ulf Brunnbauer and Anne Brüske

18:00 Panel Discussion | Area Studies as the Art and Science of Translation
Chair: Timothy Nunan (Regensburg)
Discussants:
Marianne Braig (Berlin)
Jan Hornát (Prague)
Claudia Kraft (Vienna)
Sebastian Richter (Regensburg)

Thursday, 24 April
Room 319, IOS, Altes Finanzamt, Landshuter Str. 4

08:45 Panel 1 | Travelling and Transforming Concepts across Borders and Regions
Chair: Rike Krämer-Hoppe (Regensburg)
Magdalena Modrzejewska (Krakow) | Translating Anarchisms across Borders: Epistemic shifts and cultural reinterpretations
Dagmar Schmelzer (Regensburg) | Navigating Laicity: Processes of cultural negotiation of “French modeled” laïcité in Québec
Artur Simonyan (Berlin / Yerevan) | When Non-Mainstream Western Scholars Influenced Soviet (International) Law: The case of Alejandro Alvarez and Carl Schmitt
Livia Solana Pfuetzenreiter (Paraná) | The Circulation, Translation and Reception of the Concepts of Administrative Centralization and Decentralization in Nineteenth-century Brazilian and Spanish Doctrines

11:00 Keynote 2 | The Concept of Treaty as a Matter of Translation: Russia’s historical interactions with the West
Lauri Mälksoo (Tartu)

13:45 Panel 2 | Dissemination and Transfers of Knowledge
Chair: Jochen Mecke (Regensburg)
Angela Calderón (Leipzig) | The Literary Truth of the Encyclopedic as a Historical Truth: María Negroni’s La idea natural (2024)
Susanne Greilich (Regensburg) | Translating Knowledge about America in the 18th Century: Epistemological and ideological shifts in geographical dictionaries

15:00 Panel 3 | Positioning Ideas and Art: Frictions of the local and global
Chair: Sabine Koller (Regensburg)
Piotr Słodkowski (Warsaw) | Who owns Modernism? Polish, Jewish and Ukrainian entanglements in interwar Lviv
Andrea Gremels (Frankfurt/Oder) | Surrealism’s Global Call against Fascism: Manifestoes in translation

16:30 Panel 4 | Struggles for and through Representation
Chair: Tatiana Klepikova (Regensburg)
Lucía Stecher (Santiago de Chile) | Cognitive Schemes, Narrative Schemes, Cultural Translation: Dionne Brand and the revision of the colonial archive
Vira Sachenko (Potsdam) | Intersectional Knowledge, Belonging, and Politics of translation: Between Black feminism and Eastern Europe
Laura Luciani (Ghent) & Elisabed Gedevanishvili (Tbilisi) | Subverting Norms for LGBTQ+ Activism: The “InVisible” Festival and the production of mobile queer spaces in Tbilisi

Friday, 25 April 2025
Room 319, IOS, Altes Finanzamt, Landshuter Str. 4

08:45 Panel 5 | Legal Translations, Transplants and Hierarchies
Chair: Antal Berkes (Liverpool / IOS Visiting Researcher)
Alexander Graser (Regensburg) | Translation: A useful concept for studying legal transfer?
Mahsuda Tadjibayeva (Regensburg) | Legal Structures of Influence: The transplantation of Russian trade law and its colonial impact on Central Asia
Nargiza Ramazonova (Regensburg) | Legal Transplants in Uzbekistan: The interplay of Russian and American legal influences in translating legal norms

10:45 Panel 6 | Translations of and by Intellectuals
Chair: Mirja Lecke (Regensburg)
Eliza Kriza (Bamberg) | Interpreting Imperialism and Multipolarity in the Periphery: Mexican intellectuals and the Russian invasion of Ukraine (2022)
Jobst Welge (Leipzig) |Travel and Translation in the Work of Sergio Pitol: Cultural transfers between Mexico and Eastern Europe

12:00 Panel 7 | Narratives of Identity in Translation
Chair: Natali Stegmann (Regensburg)
Halyna Lystvak (Lviv) and Anita Has-Tokarz (Lublin) | Translating Books about the Russo-Ukrainian War: Visual storytelling beyond borders
Karolina Kluczewska (Bonn) | A Two-way Translation: International circulation of knowledge about the family in Poland

13:00 Concluding Discussion
Chairs: Anne Brüske (Regensburg) and Cindy Wittke (Regensburg)