Baylor Spanish Professor to Give Keynote Address at International Conference on Literary Translation and Gender in Barcelona, Spain

On May 19, 2026, Dr. Leslie J. Harkema, Associate Professor of Spanish at Baylor University, will deliver the keynote address at the Fourth International IberTranslatio Symposium, Women Translators and Cultural Mediators from and into Iberian Languages, hosted by the University of Pompeu Fabra (Universitat Pompeu Fabra) in Barcelona, Spain. The 4th IberTranslatio Symposium brings together international scholars who will explore the vital but overlooked role of women translators in shaping literary and cultural exchange across the Iberian Peninsula, both historically and in the twentieth century.

This honor is a testament to Dr. Harkema’s cutting-edge scholarship on the relationship between Iberian multilingualism and the theory and practice of translation in modern Spain. Her keynote address, titled “Repensando la labor cultural de mujeres ibéricas en la primera mitad del siglo XX: Traducción, mediación, colaboración” (Rethinking Women’s Cultural Labor in the Iberian Peninsula in the Early 20th Century: Translation, Mediation, Collaboration) will address how recent developments in the fields of Iberian Studies and Translation Studies have allowed for new understandings of women as cultural agents in early 20th-century Iberia. The work of many female writers and artists of this period was forgotten in the wake of the Spanish Civil War, when the censorship of Francisco Franco’s dictatorship erased their stories from the historical record. This was doubly the case for work Iberian women did as translators—a type of cultural activity that often went unrecognized. While the stories of several female artists have been recovered by scholars since the end of Franco’s regime, there is still much to uncover about the “behind-the-scenes” roles early twentieth-century women played as translators and cultural mediators—often between languages on the peninsula like Spanish, Portuguese, and Catalan. Such is the case of Carmen de Burgos, a novelist who wrote extensively about Portugal, Portuguese literature, and the Portuguese women’s movement for the Spanish press in the early 1900s; and María de la O Lejárraga, who translated numerous plays and other literary works from Catalan, using her husband’s name as a pseudonym.

Dr. Harkema is Associate Professor of Spanish in the Department of Modern and Languages and Cultures at Baylor University. She is author of the monograph, Spanish Modernism and the Poetics of Youth: From Miguel de Unamuno to La Joven Literatura (University of Toronto Press, 2017), and various articles about different aspects of cultural and literary modernity in the Iberian Peninsula. Her current research focuses on the relationship between Iberian multilingualism and the theory and practice of translation in modern Spain. She is co-editor, with Evelyn Scaramella, of Translation, Mediation, Collaboration: Women and Cultural Labor in Modernist Iberia (University of Toronto Press, forthcoming).