Olivia Lott

Olivia Lott is an Olin Fellow and ABD in Hispanic Studies. She earned her BA in Spanish from Kenyon College in 2015 and was selected for a 2015-2016 Fulbright Grant to Colombia. Her dissertation, “Radical Re/Turns: Translation and Revolution in Latin American Neo-Avant-Garde Poetics, 1959-1973,” examines translational poetic practices of leftist neo-avant-gardes during the long ‘60s. This project uncovers a series of poetic-political dialogues between transtemporal and trans-spatial avant-gardes and proposes that the neo-avant-gardes re-articulate, re-route, and re-verse avant-garde archivers to make their energies of use for 1960s anti-imperialist struggle. An excerpt from this project, an article on the 1960s Venezuelan collective El Techo de la Ballena, is forthcoming from Revista Hispánica Moderna. Olivia also completed a Graduate Certificate in Translation Studies, received the 2019 Eva Sichel Memorial Essay Prize, and served as the Editorial Assistant for the Revista de Estudios Hispánicos from 2018-2019. In Spring 2021, she will be a Graduate Student Fellow in residence at the Center for the Humanities.

In addition to her critical scholarship, Olivia is the translator of Lucía Estrada’s Katabasis (2020, Eulalia Books), the co-translator of Soleida Ríos’s The Dirty Text (2018, Kenning Editions), and the curator of the monthly feature Poesía en acción on the Action Books blog. In 2016, she co-created the WashU Translators Collective with Gabriella Martin.