Byron Byrne-Taylor is an Associate Professor at the Foreign College of Hunan Normal University. He first studied English Literature at the University of Sussex, completing in 2013. He then worked in London finance, reaching the position of Office Manager at 25. He studied his MPhil in Modern Languages at the University of Cambridge in 2016-2017, then received a scholarship to study Philosophy and History at the Central European University, Budapest in 2017-2018. He completed his doctorate in Comparative Literature and Translation Studies at University College London, in 2023, with a project on the role of untranslatability in Brazilian, German and Russian literary modernisms. This was under the supervision of Prof. Stephen M. Hart and Dr. Anna Ponomareva, with time spent at Harvard University (the Institute of World Literature, 2019) and Yale University (the Yale-UCL Collaborative Program, 2021).
Since then, he has worked at King’s College London and Shanghai International Studies University, the Ernst Bloch Centre London and the London School of Business. He has been published in Critical Inquiry, Comparative Literature & World Literature, Joyce Studies Annual, Modern Language Quarterly, Translation & Literature. He has also produced regular book reviews for Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation (OCCT), had public articles published in Foreign Policy in Focus, and has had a German translation published in Philosophy of Translation.
At Hunan Normal University, he is working on three projects: developing his doctorate thesis into a monograph entitled Untranslatable Modernisms; completing a book provisionally titled The Translator’s Studio, about Maxim Gorky’s early Soviet world literature project; and a third book, Stimmung: A Biography of a Concept, concentrating on translation and historicity in the German context between Romanticism and contemporary debates. Brazil, Germany and Russia remain focal areas of analysis. Yet China is increasingly emerging as a point of reference in his work. This spans from Zheng Zhenduo’s early models of world literature and Lu Xun’s translations, to the more recent appearance of Zhang Jiang’s distinction between ‘public interpretation’ and ‘enforced interpretation,’ Ling Jianhou’s rediscovery of Russian Poetics and Wang Ning’s advocation for a World Poetics. Above all, Byrne-Taylor’s work is preoccupied with how ideas travel across languages and civilizations. His present teaching and research in Changsha are premised upon geopolitical multipolarity, international communications, untranslatability, and world literature.