Jennifer Hayashida
Doctoral Student
The Film, Photography and Literary Composition UnitAbout Jennifer Hayashida
I was born in Oakland, CA, grew up in the suburbs of Stockholm and San Francisco, and received my B.A. in American Studies from the University of California at Berkeley, after which I completed my M.F.A. in writing from Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College. My multilingual and cross-disciplinary practice spans writing, translation, and visual art. I am the author of the poetry collection A Machine Wrote This Song (Gramma Poetry/Black Ocean, 2018) and the chapbook Översättaren som arkiv/Arkiv som översätter (Autor, 2020). I have been active as a literary translator since the early 2000s.
I am currently completing an English translation of Sara Lidman’s seminal 1955 novel Hjortronlandet, while also translating work by Athena Farrokhzad, Leila Inanna Sultan, and Bo i Gemenskap (BIG). Recent projects, from the Swedish, include Ida Börjel's MA (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2024), Iman Mohammed's Behind the Tree Backs (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2022), and Elin Cullhed's Euphoria (Canongate, 2022), where my translation was selected as runner-up for the Society of Authors’ Bernard Shaw Prize. Together with Andjeas Ejiksson, I am the Swedish co-translator of Don Mee Choi's Knappt krig (20TAL, 2023) and Kim Hyesoon's Autobiografi av död (20TAL, 2022). Other past work includes translations of Fredrik Nyberg, Burcu Sahin, Solmaz Sharif, Katarina Taikon, Lawen Mohtadi, Eva Sjödin, and Karl Larsson.
My writing and translations have been published in journals such as Provins, The Asian American Literary Review, Ord & Bild, Salt Hill, Paletten, Chicago Review, and Circumference, while my work in film/video/audio have been exhibited in Sweden and internationally, including at Bildmuseet, Kalmar konstmuseum, Centre Pompidou, the Flaherty Film Seminar, the New Museum, and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics. I was a finalist for the 2023 Rome Prize and have received grants and awards from, among others, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the Swedish Authors' Fund, the New York Foundation for the Arts, PEN, the Witter Bynner Poetry Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, and MacDowell.
About my research:
Feeling Translation, my doctoral artistic research project, is a durational cross-disciplinary project investigating translation's insurgent potential via literary translation, pedagogical initiatives, and cross-genre writing. Feeling Translation proposes that translation enact an intervention, not merely by excavating the obscure or the radical, but by foregrounding the translator as a Foucauldian subject – not the purportedly neutral postracial technician of liberal literary imaginations. Drawing upon the interdiscipline of Asian American studies and Kandice Chuh's invocation to mobilize the field "otherwise," that is, via transnational Asian American imaginaries, this project seeks to produce a critical translation practice and pedagogy against dictates of the monolingual paradigm (Yildiz) and world literature (Apter). By foregrounding situated ontologies of translation vis-à-vis multilingualism, experiences of forced displacement, and racialized national scripts, Feeling Translation proposes that translation offer opportunities for insurgence aligned with feminist, queer, and decolonial thinking and praxis.
Doctoral supervisors: Nils Olsson & Jessica Hemmings