C.C. Wharram
Director, Center for the Humanities Office: 3010 - Coleman HallEmail: ccwharram@eiu.edu
INTRODUCTION
Fall 2022 Office Hours: Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays 12:00-1:30 p.m.
My research interests include translation studies, Romantic and Gothic literature, and the intersections between literature, philosophy, and science in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I direct The Center for the Humanities and coordinate the Health & Medical Humanities minor program at EIU. My recent essays explore the intersections of biopolitics and medical history (in Transforming Contagion, Rutgers UP 2018), and humanism, translation, and the nonhuman (in Educational Theory in October 2014). I edited a special volume on “Teaching Romantic Translation(s)” for Romantic Circle Pedagogies (July 2014).
My writing on Romanticism and/or translation has appeared in Germanic Review, Gothic Studies, Nineteenth Century Literature Criticism, and the collections Translations of Romantic Texts and Staël's Philosophy of the Passions. I was selected to participate in the NEH Summer Institute “The Centrality of the Translation to the Humanities: New Interdisciplinary Scholarship” (2013), and am currently finishing a book manuscript on the role of translation theory and practice in Romantic movements. My translation and scholarly edition of Goethe's The Passion of Young Werther is under contract with Broadview Press.
Pronouns:
To address the issues of preferred-gender pronouns (PGPs), I cite (with appropriate changes) an editorial by undergraduate student Christina M. Xiao: "I personally take any pronouns. But people by and large are uncomfortable with that idea, even though 'any' literally means you can’t get it wrong. So I often need to qualify my PGPs as 'any pronouns — people generally use [he/his],' since I have a [man’s] body and a [man’s] face and I know people are most comfortable using [he/his] to refer to me. As you might imagine, that’s a little long to fit on the end of my display name in Zoom."
My EIU Story
Education & Training
B.A., McGill University (English, honours)
PhD, University of Minnesota (English; German minor)
Conference Presentations
“Nothing Human.” Nothing human is foreign to me: The power and perils of translation. Symposium of The Philosophy of Education Discussion Group (PoEDG). University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. 152 Wohlers Hall, Champaign, IL. (March 2014). Symposium Address.
“‘Media of Varying Densities’: Of Touching Relations in Ernst Chladni and Walter Benjamin,” Material Culture: Bodies and Things session, International Conference on Romanticism (ICR), Oakland University (September 2013).
“Subjects and Objects in Translation: Romantic Resonance in Kant and Chladni,” Romantic Translation/Transcreation special session, organized by Daniel DeWispelare, North American Society for the Study of Romanticism (NASSR) Conference, Boston, MA (August 2013).
“Independent Media: Aeolian Harps, Emotives, and the Translation of Sentiment,” NASSR Conference, Park City, Utah (August 2012).
“Translation as Inception: Fuller, Staël, and the Transplantation of Feeling,” When Romantics Read Romantics Transnationally session, organized by Katharine Grimm and Carol Strauss Sotiropoulos, American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) Conference, Vancouver, Canada (April 2011).
“Germaine de Staël’s Hybrid Reproductions,” Matters of Life and Death special session, organized by Karyna Szmurlo, President of the Germaine de Staël Society for Revolutionary and Romantic Studies, Clemson University, American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS) Conference, Albuquerque, New Mexico (March 2010).
“Toussaint or not Toussaint: Kleist and the Terrorist Aesthetic of Translation,” Translation and Genius: Itineraries of the Atlantic in Romantic Modernity special session, organized and chaired by Mary Favret, NASSR Conference, Duke University (May 2009).
Podcast: The Close Reading Cooperative, Department of English, EIU (also available on iTunes U):
“Introduction”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92eAN0Bjd84
“Pathetic Fallacy”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUDNDscOw0I
“Etymology”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTMtsYqVxDk
“Anaphora”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUVy8jMjsjM&
“Dialect”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vruA57Kie3Y
“Sonnets”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6NXfabQnio
Community
Publications
“‘A Proper Contagion’: The Inoculation Narrative and the Immunological Turn,” in Transforming Contagion: Risky Contacts among Bodies, Disciplines, and Nations, edited by Edited by Breanne Fahs, Annika Mann, Eric Swank, and Sarah Stage (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, July 2018).
“Nothing Human,” invited paper for the special volume “Humanism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Ethics of Translation,” in Educational Theory 64.5 (October 2014), 515-532.
“Preface: Objects of Translation,” in Translation Theory in Practice: Teaching Romantic Translation(s), Special Volume of Romantic Circle Pedagogies, July 2014.
Translator, Germaine de Staël's De l’esprit des traductions, Translation as ‘Genre in its own Excess’: Germaine de Staël’s ‘On the Spirit of Translation(s)’” in Translation Theory in Practice: Teaching Romantic Translation(s), Special Volume of Romantic Circle Pedagogies, July 2014.
“Aeolian Translation: The Aesthetics of Mediation and the Jouissance of Genre,” in Staël's Philosophy of the Passions: Sensibility, Society, and the Sister Arts, edited by Karyna Szmurlo and Tili Boon Cuillé (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2013), 151-171.
“Desire in the Literary Field: Hagiography, History, and Anagrams in Kleist’s Der Findling” in Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism(NCLC-222), ed. Kathy Darrow (Detroit: Thomson Gale, 2010), 242-261.
Funding & Grants
Frequently Taught Courses
Research & Creative Interests
Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British and continental literatures, translation studies, literary theory, philosophy (especially Kant, Hegel, and object-oriented ontology).
Professional Affiliations