Dr Anissa Daoudi has been awarded a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship, for the project ‘Sexual violence against women in Algeria: narratives, translations, languages’.
It is widely acknowledged in scholarship that the act of translating a direct, lived experience into a narrative can have a profound impact on the style, content and reception of narratives. This process also provides translation with considerable influence, as it permits the telling of stories – both real and imagined – that have been excluded from dominant or officially sanctioned discourses.
The aim of this one-year fellowship (awarded £26,875) is to study the representation and translation of accounts of sexual violence against women during the Algerian civil war, 1991-2002. Using fieldwork and written sources, Dr Daoudi will compare this to colonial violence against women in the Algerian Liberation War that took place between 1954 and 1962.
This research will investigate how translation – between media and between languages – can promote individual testimonies and reshape social memory. This will illuminate neglected aspects of Algerian history and explain the general principles of the relationship between translation, gender and power. The fellowship will start in May 2017.