Literary Multilingualism and its Scholarly Community: The Editorial Team of the Journal of Literary Multilingualism

The proposed event is a seminar at University College Cork, Ireland, on April 24, 2026, whose purpose is to introduce the scholarly field of Literary Multilingualism and its ‘home’, The Journal of Literary Multilingualism (Brill-DeGruyter) as a community of scholars and writers, presented by the Editorial team of Journal of Literary Multilingualism. We will familiarize the audience with the history of the interdisciplinary field, its diversity and the breadth of its scholarship under the umbrella of world languages and cultures, as well as literary genres and art forms. We will present examples of literary texts in L2 and analytical modalities of their studies. Natasha Lvovich, the JLM founder and Editor in Chief, will introduce several multilingual authors and texts as examples, exchange ideas with the audience, faculty and graduate students at UCC and online COST project participants, and read a short vignette that she had written, which echoes the subject of the discussion. The seminar will continue in the form of a dialogue with the JLM editorial Assistant, Giulia Travaglini, a PhD student at Sapienza University, who will read two poems by the Palestinian poet Yousif M. Qasmiyeh, and engage the audience in the discussion. The proposed interactive seminar to be presented by the JLM editorial team at UCC is an ongoing effort to exchange ideas on the emerging field of multilingualism in literature across the globe and to offer a ‘place’ for collaboration with various individuals and institutions. The seminar will take shape of a dialogue/conversation between the JLM editor and the editorial assistant, addressing the participants in the room and online. We will introduce a few multilingual authors, classics of the last century (e.g., the iconic ‘translingual trinity’: Beckett, Conrad, and Nabokov) and present new books and new authors, which appeared on an impressive linguistic and geographic spectrum, triggered by postcolonial and post–Cold War developments, mass migrations, exile, transnational lifestyle, and, most recently, by economic and political globalization. Contemporary multilingual authors, such as Junot Diaz, Amin Maalouf, and Xiaolu Guo, reflect these geopolitical issues and echo the voices of immigrant communities and transnational realities across the continents. European Jews, for instance, suffered century-old persecution and spoke and wrote in languages of their diaspora: take the Bulgarian-born, German-Ladino-English writer Elias Canetti or Sholem Aleichem, who lived in Russia at the turn of the nineteenth century and wrote in Russian, Hebrew, and Yiddish, and a group of recent Soviet émigrés to the United States, including Gary Shteyngart, Anya Ulinich, Michael Idov, and Boris Fishman, who are now considered New York novelists. Other exiles, immigrants, or multifarious nomads and transnationals have traversed continents, countries, and histories—for example, the Argentine Chilean American ‘citizen of the world’ Ariel Dorfman, or Aleksandar Hemon, who emigrated from the war-torn Yugoslavia, or the ‘internal immigrant’ Hugo Hamilton, who has embodied the conflicts of his Irish German family. A new autobiography genre, cross-cultural translingual autobiography or ‘language memoir,’ has been developed by multilingual writers like Eva Hoffman (Polish, writing in English), Ilan Stavans (writing in English and Spanish), to name only a few. Multilingual poets innovated poetry using a mix of languages: T. S. Eliot wrote using a mix of English and French, the ‘Babel Man’ Eugene Jolas invented a new Esperanto for poetry ‘Atlantica,’ and the virtuoso Joseph Brodsky, exiled from the Soviet Union, wrote bilingually in Russian and English. The Journal of Literary Multilingualism (JLM) opens its doors (twice a year, online only) to a wide variety of disciplines engaged with the subject (e.g., comparative literature, linguistics, multilingualism studies, cultural anthropology, postcolonial studies, psychology, translation studies, history, ethnic and cultural studies) and welcomes international and interdisciplinary collaborations. The engagement that we will bring to faculty and graduate students at UCC and COST online participants, as a result of the seminar will stimulate their interests and amplify networks and research, from various disciplinary angles to the field of literary multilingualism. JLM will keep its gates of knowledge open to scholars in literary multilingualism and adjacent fields, who will fulfill its mission of promoting creativity and multilingualism in the world, away from isolation and nationalism. As a result, more collaborations with educational institutions and international organizations will take place and more contributions and research projects will be submitted to JLM.