College:
Hertford College
Course:
DPhil Oriental Studies
Contact:
aoife.cantrill@hertford.ox.ac.uk
Educational Background:
MPhil, Modern Chinese Studies, University of Oxford
BA Hons, History, University of Oxford
Research interests:
Aoife is an AHRC funded doctoral student at the University of Oxford under the supervision of Professor Margaret Hillenbrand. Her doctoral thesis explores the role of translators in shaping narratives of Japanese colonial rule in Taiwan. It focuses on a set of Japanese-language texts written by Taiwanese women between 1934 and 1945, detailing how these works were translated, retranslated and adapted in the years following 1979. The thesis intervenes to offer a translation history of the Japanese Empire and its legacy in Taiwan. Aoife will receive a Centre of Chinese Studies grant from National Taiwan Library to carry out archival work relating to this research in 2022.
Aoife has presented papers relating to her doctoral thesis at conferences including the Association for Asian Studies (2021), the International Association for Translation and Intercultural Studies (2021) and the North American Taiwan Studies Association (2019). Outside her DPhil research, Aoife has published on paratext in Chinese author Yan Lianke’s work.
Aoife is a convenor of the International History of East Asia seminar at the Oxford China Centre. She also convenes the Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation discussion group. She sits on the organising committee of the Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation study centre.
Recent Publications:
Aoife Cantrill, ‘Neither Fact nor Fiction: Endnotes, Mythorealism and reading “Inner Truth” in Yan Lianke’s Lenin’s Kisses (Shouhuo)’, Concentric 47, no. 2 (2021).
