Trinity’s Head of the Italian Department, Dr Peter Arnds, has been elected to Academia Europæa, the European Academy of Humanities, Letters, and Science. Arnds, an Associate Professor and Fellow, is also the Director of the MPhil in Comparative Literature, the former Director of the MPhil in Literary Translation and teaches in the German department.
Arnds stated that he was “honoured” to be elected to the Academy. “[I] am looking forward to working with fellow members in support of the Academy’s mission of advancing research and scholarship across Europe,” said Arnds. He is to be inducted as new member at the 30th Annual Plenary Conference of Academia Europaea in Barcelona, Spain this November.
In 2012, Dr Arnds became a Fellow of Trinity College Dublin and created the Literary Translation conference series hosted by the Long Room Hub and organised three international conferences at Trinity between 2012-14. In 2014 Dr Arnds was elected the President of the Comparative Literature Association of Ireland.
Academia Europæa is a non-governmental association that works in an advisory capacity to the EU. Academia Europæa members consist of scientists and scholars who collectively aim to promote learning, education and research. Membership of Academia Europæa is by invitation only.
Academia Europæa’s 4000 members include 72 Nobel Laureates, several of whom were elected to the Academy before they received the prize. In Ireland, there are currently 41 members listed across 21 fields of research.
Arnds is to join under the “Literary and Theatrical Studies” category, which at present has six fellow members associated with Trinity’s Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences. Arnds’ election recognises his contributions to the fields of Comparative Literature, German Literary and Cultural Studies, and Literary Translation.
Arnds has taught in the intensive summer language institute at Middlebury College, Vermont, and more recently held a Visiting Professorship at the J.M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice at the University of Adelaide. He has twice held a Research Fellowship at the Institute of Advanced Study at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, India.
In 2015, Arnds was elected into the membership of the PEN Centre for German writers abroad. Dhe has published prose and poetry in literary journals around the globe, and was a writer-in-residence at the Heinrich Böll Cottage on Achill Island (Mayo). His collection of poetry “A Rare Clear Day” appeared in RedFox Press in 2015.
Arnds is also the author of several works including “Intertextuality in Wilhelm Raabe and Charles Dickens”, has edited “Translating the Holocaust Literature” and translated Bolthauser’s novel “Stromschnellen”.
