International Writers Series: Matt Reeck

Join the International Writers Series for an evening of literary translation with translator, poet, and scholar Matt Reeck. He will be joined in conversation by Jey Sushil, Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature. 

In one interview, Reeck states “translators share an interest with the oppressed. They might be able to help decolonize knowledge, if their work isn’t entirely co-opted by the institutions that broadcast it. Since we’re among the surveilled, the forgotten, and our work is diminished by the organs of capital, who better than translators to extend their natural sympathy to others who are surveilled, overwritten, and diminished by those in power?” Moving between originals and translations, from Hindi, Urdu, and French, this conversation will approach larger questions about politics, practices, and aesthetics of literary translation.  

Free and open to all, registration requested.

Speakers

Matt Reeck is a Guggenheim Fellow in translation. He has won the Albertine Prize and the Global Humanities Prize for translations from the French of Zahia Rahmani and Abdelkébir Khatibi, a New India Foundation Translation Fellowship for the Urdu of Qazi Abdul Ghaffar, and What of the Earth Was Saved, his translation from the Hindi of Leeladhar Jagoori, was a finalist for the Derek Walcott Prize. He earned his PhD in Comparative Literature from UCLA, and his monograph Ethics of Description: The Anthropological Dispositif and French Modern Travel Writing tracks anthropology’s interweaving with travel writing. He lives in Brooklyn with his family.  

Jey Sushil is a PhD candidate in the international writers track in the Department of Comparative Literature and Thought. He is a bilingual writer and the author of The World of Sadness Lies Within (Rukh, Delhi, 2025), and a translator with a keen interest in South Asian and world literature. 

This event is co-sponsored by WashU Libraries, the Department of Jewish, Islamic, and Middle Eastern Studies, Redefining Doctoral Education in the Humanities (RDE), the Center for Humanities, and the Department of Comparative Literature & Thought.