Associate Professor in Arabic Literature and Translation, University of Leeds, UK

Expertise: Bible translation; history of translation (with particular reference to the Arab World); Bourdieusean applications; literary translation

Sameh Hanna is currently a Global Translation Advisor and Translation Studies Researcher with United Bible Societies. After earning his PhD from University of Manchester, UK, he got an Andrew Mellon postdoctoral fellowship in the Humanities at University College London, followed by two lectureships at the Universities of Salford and Leeds. At Leeds he worked as an associate professor in Arabic Literature and Translation Studies and served as the director of Arabic, Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies before joining UBS. His main research is within the area of sociology of translation, with focus on the socio-cultural dynamics of the translation and reception of canonical texts (including Shakespeare’s work and the Bible) in Arab-Islamic settings on which he published several peer-reviewed articles. His book, Bourdieu in Translation Studies: The Sociocultural Dynamics of Shakespeare Translation in Egypt (2016), published by Routledge, offers a full-length investigation of the implications of Bourdieu’s sociology of cultural production for the study of Drama translation. He is also the co-editor of the Routledge Handbook of Arabic Translation(2019). Dr Hanna is a founding member of the International Association of Translation and Intercultural Studies and served as an associate editor of the peer review journal Target and is currently on the editorial boards of the two peer-reviewed journals, Target and Translation in Society.