Biography
Otilia Baraboi holds university degrees in French Literature from Romania, Switzerland and the United States. Her field of specialization is 20th and 21st century French and Francophone literature with a particular focus on Eastern European writers in Paris, language ideology, bilingualism, Translation and Diaspora Studies. She wrote articles on Assia Djebar, Cioran and post-colonial thought and published short fiction in Romanian. Her PhD dissertation “Language and Untranslatability: Cioran’s Self-Translation into French” explores the role of translation in shaping our views of world literature. She is currently working on the English translation of a collection of texts that she co-authored about women’s experience during Communist Romania.
Otilia Baraboi is also the president and co-founder of American Romanian Cultural Society, a local non-profit that organizes a Romanian Film Festival in partnership with SIFF and many other educational and cultural projects among which the first Romanian-language school in Washington State.