Regina Galasso | A Visibility Turn

Regina Galasso

Director, Gentzler Translation Center. Associate Professor of Spanish & Portuguese Studies

University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Regina Galasso is Associate Professor in the Spanish and Portuguese Studies Program and Director of the Edwin C. Gentzler Translation Center of the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her award-winning scholarly work highlights the role of translation in literary histories and contemporary culture. She creates and supports ways to promote translation education to encourage greater understanding of this needed service and intellectual activity. She is the author of Translating New York: The City’s Languages in Iberian Literatures (Liverpool UP, 2018) and, for the general public, Becoming a Translator for Dummies (Wiley, 2024). She is the editor of Translation as Home: A Multilingual Life by Ilan Stavans (U of Toronto P, 2024), This Is a Classic: Translators on Making Writers Global (Bloomsbury, 2023), Avenues of Translation: The City in Iberian and Latin American Writing (Bucknell UP, 2019) with Evelyn Scaramella, and a special Nueva York issue of Translation Review with Carmen Boullosa (2012). She is the translator of Alicia Borinsky’s Lost Cities Go to Paradise (Swan Isle P, 2015) and Miguel Barnet’s A True Story: A Cuban in New York (Jorge Pinto Books, 2010). Since 2018, Dr. Galasso has worked with public schools throughout Massachusetts to provide educational and professional development opportunities to K-12 school interpreters, translators, and non-provider staff. During 2018-2019, she was appointed by the Commissioner of the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education to serve on the School Interpreters Task Force and continues to partner with DESE to improve language access initiatives in Massachusetts schools. With her students, she curated the 2022 exhibition “Read the World: Picture Books and Translation” for the Reading Library at the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art. She is the recipient of the 2024 Isle Andrews Service Award from New England Translators Association. She contributed to the establishment of the translated literature category for the 23rd Annual Massachusetts Book Awards and is a board member of the Massachusetts Center for the Book. She is a member of the Advisory Board of the Planet Word Museum in Washington, D.C. She is the founder and editor with Mario Pereira of the book series TRANSLATED BY published by Bloomsbury Academic. Before joining the faculty at UMass Amherst, she was a professor at the Borough of Manhattan Community College of the City University of New York.