Byron Byrne-Taylor

Profile

Dr Byron Byrne-Taylor received his doctorate in Comparative Literature and Translation Studies at University College London in 2023, having spent time at the Institute of World Literature at Harvard University in 2019, and at Yale University in 2021 as part of the Yale-UCL Collaborative Program. His thesis was entitled: 'Resituating the Untranslatable: Modernism from Moscow to Rio to Berlin'. Recognising them simultaneously as objects of cultural mediation, works of world literature and as cultural objects determined by capital, Byron is predominantly interested in literature, philosophy, cinema and other forms of dialogue, cultural and political collaboration, translation and exchange between Brazil, Russia and Europe. He has published in Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation, the Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics, Journal of World Literature, Translation and Literature, and an essay has been republished in World Literature and Postcolonial Studies, edited by David Damrosch and Bhavya Tiwari (Brill, 2023). Byrne-Taylor arrived at these interests from a thoroughly rounded humanist education, fortified by a willingness to learn languages independently. He studied for a BA in English Literature at the University of Sussex, Modern Languages at the University of Cambridge, Philosophy & History at the Central European University in Budapest. As a Visiting Fellow at the Ernst Bloch Centre, he is working with Professor Johan Siebers on a project provisionally entitled ‘The Role of Stimmung in Martin Heidegger’s Aesthetics’, which attempts to bring the theme of untranslatability into a philosophical analysis of Heidegger’s writings on art, etymologising the history of the word Stimmung across a range of German Romantic poetry and thought while resituating Heidegger’s aesthetic positions within the broader context of contemporary German and Austrian aesthetic debates.