Carolyn Shread is Senior Lecturer in French at Mount Holyoke College and since 2013 has taught as a faculty exchange at Smith College, where she sits on the advisory board of the Translation Studies Concentration. Her research areas include 20th­-century and contemporary French and Francophone literature, with a special interest in Haitian literature and in women's writing. She is also actively involved in the field of translation studies and is on the advisory board of the Nida FUSP Center for Advanced Reasearch in Translation in Rimini, Italy. She has translated both scholarly and literary texts, and has written numerous articles on translation. She has published six translations by contemporary French philosopher Catherine Malabou, including most recently Pleasure Erased: The Clitoris Unthought, recipient of a 2022 French Voices Award. She has written on the intersection of translation and Malabou's signature concept, plasticity, as well as introducing Bracha Ettinger’s psychoanalytic concept of metramorphosis as a means of rethinking translational paradigms with a feminist lens. She published several articles on her process translating Marie Vieux-Chauvet’s Les Rapaces and is on the editorial board of the Haitian journal Legs et Littérature.

Selected Publications

“Women (Re)Writing Authority: A Roundtable Discussion on Feminist Translation” Ergun et al. Translation, Feminism and Gender, Luise von Flotow and Hala Kamal, 2020.

“Une intelligence autre: Reception Plasticity and the Melancholy of the Translated Author” Palimpsestes 33, 2019, 92-101.

“Translating Feminist Philosophers” in P. Rawling and P. Wilson (eds.) Routledge Handbook of Translation and Philosophy, London and New York: Routledge, 2018, 324-344.

“Watching Thinking Move: Malabou in Translation” in Thinking Catherine Malabou: Passionate Disattachments, ed. Isabel Dahms Rowman and Littlefield, 2018.

Selected Translations

Mbembe, Achille, trans. C. Shread The Universal Right to Breathe, Critical Inquiry In the Moment, April 13, 2020. https://critinq.wordpress.com/2020/04/13/the-universal-right-to-breathe/

Tadjo, Véronique, trans. C. Shread Aimer: Fields of Battle, Fields of Love, The Massachusetts Review, 2019.

Malabou, Catherine, trans. C. Shread Pleasure Erased: The Clitoris Unthought, Catherine Malabou, Polity Press, U.K. 2022.

--- Morphing Intelligence: From IQ Measurement to Artificial Brains, Columbia University Press, NY, 2019.

--- Before Tomorrow: Epigenesis and Rationality, Catherine Malabou, Polity Press, UK, 2016.

--- Ontology of the Accident: An Essay on Destructive Plasticity, Polity Press, UK, 2013.