Cogut Institute for the Humanities

Paulina Gąsiorowska ’27 is an undergraduate concentrating in Comparative Literature and History of Art and Architecture. Her thesis, tentatively titled “The Matter of Translation: On the First Printed Vernacular Editions of Aesop’s Fables, and How to Carry Them Across to the Present,” juxtaposes three late medieval/early modern printed translations of the ancient short story collection known as Aesop’s Fables: the 1477 Latin-German edition, the 1484 English edition, and the 1510 Polish edition. Attending to their respective narratives, paratexts, illustrative programmes, and intended audiences, she will produce literary translations of these texts accountable to the needs of modern readers, ultimately arguing that literature survives — and, indeed, thrives — thanks to the innumerable forms and re-forms it assumes across history.Her academic interests also include the gendered metaphorics of translation theory as well as the fraught border between reading and seeing as experiences and as critical instruments. In April, she presented her paper “The Printer’s Widow: Recovering An (Arche)Type Across Mid-16th Century Europe” at the University of Cambridge during the annual conference of the Association for Art History. She is Editor-in-Chief of The Prospector, the departmental journal of Comparative Literature at Brown, and serves as the Student Assistant Director of the Writing Fellows Program.