Dr Ruth Chester

  • Senior Teaching Associate
  • Senior Library Assistant for Italian
Dr Ruth Chester

Contact

Location

  • Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics
  • Raised Faculty Building, ÃÜÌÒÊÓƵ, Sidgwick Avenue , CB3 9DA

About

Ruth Chester is a Senior Teaching Associate specialising in Literary Translation from Italian into English, as well as a professional literary and academic translator and editor. She was awarded a MA in Literary Translation from the University of East Anglia in 2023.

She is also a specialist in medieval European Literature and Culture, having completed a MPhil in Medieval Language, Literature and Culture at Trinity College, Dublin in 2007 and a PhD focused on Virtue in Dante’s Commedia at the University of Leeds in 2012.

Research

Teaching interests: 

  • Translation from Italian to English

Research interests: 

  • Literary translation theory and practice
  • Literature as ethical practice
  • Creative-critical writing
  • Dante and medieval literature and culture

Recent research projects: 

  • Digital Levi Project
  • Openings for Meaning: Translating Maria Attanasio’s Correva l’anno
  • Dante’s Vita nova: A Collaborative Reading

Published works: 

  • 'In Our Image: Dante Translations in the New Millennium' in Dante's Comedy in English Translation: Critical Perspectives, Reception Histories, Assessments, ed. by Jacob Blakesley, Theodore J. Cachey, Jr., and Federica Pich (Routledge, 2026)
  • ‘The Spaces of Vita nova II’ in Dante’s Vita nova: A Collaborative Reading, ed. by Zygmunt Baranski and Heather Webb (University of Notre Dame Press, 2023).
  • Scent by Bianca Pitzorno, translated by Ruth Chester in Literary Translation: UEA MA Anthologies 2022 (Egg Box Publishing, 2022).
  • The Splendour of Nothingness by Maria Attanasio, translated by Ruth Chester, Asymptote (October 2021). .
  • Dante Alighieri, Purgatorio, translated by Stanley Lombardo, introduction by Claire Honess and Matthew Treherne, notes by Ruth Chester (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2016).
  • ‘Dante’s Virtù: Creation, Embodiment and Revelation’, Italian Studies, 70:1 (2015), 19–32.
  • ‘Dante’, in The Year’s Work in Modern Language Studies: MHRA 75 (2015: survey year 2013), pp. 269-277.
  • ‘Virtue in Dante’, in Reviewing Dante's Theology, ed. by Claire E. Honess and Matthew Treherne, 2 vols. (Lang, 2013) II, pp. 211-52.

Teaching and supervision

ITA2: Italian to English Translation

ITB2: Italian to English Translation

Supervisor of Year Abroad translation projects (Italian)