• Royce Fellowship
Royce Fellow Benjamin Connor
Benjamin
Connor

Concentration 

Comparative Literature & French Studies

Award Year 

2021
Translating the Refugee Experience

Ben Connor is a junior from Wilmington, Delaware concentrating in Comparative Literature & French Studies. Ben focuses on literary translation, and has worked as a freelance translator for the University of Delaware, Williams College, and the Respond Crisis Hotline, and is currently working with a French composer/lyricist team to translate a musical comedy into English. In addition, Ben is the Vice Chair of a student theatre group, a Bruin Club leader, and a teaching assistant for the French Department.

Project: 

Ben works with a social enterprise called NaTakallam that employs refugees from a variety of linguistic backgrounds as translators, language teachers, and interpreters. His project is a collaborative translation of a text/texts about the refugee experience. He will organize a group of refugee translators and collaborate with them on translations of transnational or displaced playwrights/poets from their mother languages into English. The project will aim to interrogate the relationship of the translation form to transnational content, while exploring the translation’s ability to preserve authenticity of experience in a new language.

Advisor: Stéphanie Ravillon