Charlotte Ryland, Ph.D.
Director of the Translation Exchange, The Queen's College; Honorary Faculty Research Fellow, MML
Research
Charlotte Ryland researches the role of culture and creativity in language teaching and learning, with a particular focus on how 'creative translation' approaches can improve motivation for language learning and widen participation throughout school and beyond.
Prior to this, Charlotte researched German literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with a particular focus on the intersection between literature and politics, on the representation of the Holocaust, and on comparative literature and translation. Her PhD thesis, on the poetry and translations of the post-Holocaust poet Paul Celan, was published in 2010: 'Paul Celan's Encounters with Surrealism: Trauma, Translation and Shared Poetic Space' (Legenda). She was editor of the bi-annual journal New Books in German for ten years and Postdoctoral Researcher on the Writing Brecht project in the Modern Languages faculty at Oxford from 2014-18. Charlotte is committed to languages outreach and to widening participation at university level, and was the founding co-ordinator of the Oxford German Network.
Advocacy and Outreach
Charlotte Ryland founded the Translation Exchange (QTE) in 2018. She is also Director of the Stephen Spender Trust (SST), a charity that promotes language learning and literary translation. Through both organisations she aims to engage people of all ages and backgrounds in literary translation, and to bring creative translation into UK schools.
In 2024 Charlotte founded Oxford Languages Advocacy Network (OxLAN), to support collaboration and shared learning between those in Oxford advocating for languages and running languages outreach projects locally and nationally.
In 2024 Charlotte joined the Editorial Group of the Languages Gateway, the UK's new portal for languages launched in 2023.
In 2021 Charlotte launched Inclusive Outreach through Translation, to develop guidelines and resources for increasing inclusion and accessibility in university outreach programmes.
Until 2019 Charlotte ran New Books in German, a UK-based project that promotes German-language literature across the world, and was a Lecturer in German at The Queen’s College.
Publications
Monograph
Paul Celan’s Encounters with Surrealism: Trauma, Translation and Shared Poetic Space (Oxford: Legenda, 2010)
Articles
‘We Actually Created a Good Mood!’: Metalinguistic and literary engagement through collaborative translation in the secondary classroom’, co-authored with Clementine Beauvais, in Language, Culture and Curriculum (2020)
‘Collaboration and Commitment: German-Language Books across Borders, in Transnational German Studies (Liverpool, 2020)
‘Keeping Faith: Michael Hamburger’s translations of Paul Celan’s poetry’, Jahrbuch für internationale Germanistik 43.2 (2012)
‘Re-membering Adorno: Political and cultural agendas in the debate about post-Holocaust art’, German Life and Letters 62/ii (2009), 140-156
‘“Wenn wir weiterleben wollen, muß dieser Satz widerlegt werden”: Rewriting Adorno in the debate on post-Holocaust poetry’, Focus on German Studies 13 (2006), 51-68
Editions
Brecht and the Writer's Workshop, edited with Tom Kuhn (Bloomsbury, 2019)
Methuen Drama Student Editions and Dual-Language Editions:
The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui by Bertolt Brecht
Spring Awakening by Frank Wedekind
Mother Courage (parallel text) by Bertolt Brecht
Fear and Misery of the Third Reich by Bertolt Brecht
The Good Person of Szechwan by Bertolt Brecht
The Good Person of Szechwan (parallel text) by Bertolt Brecht
Translations
A translation of Brecht’s unfinished play The Real Life of Jacob Trotalong (Das wirkliche Leben des Jakob Gehherda) in a collection of his dramatic fragments in English translation that I co-edited with Tom Kuhn (Bloomsbury, 2019).
I was one of the translators for the new collection of Brecht’s theoretical writings on peformance, Brecht on Performance (Bloomsbury, 2014).