Roundtable: Lia Brozgal and Matt Reeck

Lia Brozgal is Professor of French and Francophone Studies in the Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies at UCLA. Her research--which deals broadly with the literature, history, and culture of Francophone North Africa and contemporary France--is animated by questions that revolve around the representation of history and political violence; archives; autobiography; space; and the visual. Works include: A Jewish Childhood in the Muslim Mediterranean (2023); Absent the Archive: Cultural Traces of a Massacre in Paris (17 October 1961) (2020); and Against Autobiography: Albert Memmi and the Production of Theory (2013).

Matt Reeck is a translator, poet, and scholar. A Guggenheim Fellow in Translation, he translates from French, Hindi, Urdu, and Korean. This year, his translation from the French of Abdelkébir Khatibi's The Wound of the Name (2022 winner of the Global Humanities Translation Prize) was published by Northwestern UP. His translations of Paul Guillibert’s Anthropocene Communism and Milan Kundera’s 89 Words, followed by Prague: A Disappearing Poem were published this fall by Verso and Harper Perennial. What of the Earth Was Saved, his translation of the Hindi poetry of Leeladhar Jagoori, is a finalist for the Derek Walcott Prize.