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Sara Van Meerbergen Associate Professor
Contact
Name and title: Sara Van MeerbergenAssociate Professor
ORCID0000-0002-7375-6808 Länk till annan webbplats.
Workplace: Department of Slavic and Baltic Studies Finnish Dutch and German Länk till annan webbplats.
Visiting address Room E 568Universitetsvägen 10 E, plan 5
Postal address Institutionen för slaviska och baltiska språk, finska, nederländska och tyska106 91 Stockholm
About me
Keywords: Dutch, Dutch studies, Netherlands, Belgium, children's literature, picturebooks, multimodal discourse analysis, social semiotics, translation, translation studies, translation sociology, retranslation
I am Associate Professor in Dutch Studies and work as Director of Studies and Senior Lecturer in Dutch Studies at Stockholm University. I have worked at the section for Dutch Studies since 2005. In 2010 I got my doctoral degree with my dissertation "Dutch picture books become Swedish. A multimodal translation analysis" (written and published in Swedish incl. an extended summary in English). In my dissertation, I studied Flemish and Dutch picture books in Swedish translation. Between 2011 and 2015 I worked on a postdoctoral project "Play, parody, intertextuality and interaction. Postmodern Flemish picture books as semiotic playgrounds" funded by Ahlström and Terserusstiftelsen. Between 2015 and 2016 I worked both as Senior Lecturer in Translation and Translation Studies (Dept. of Swedish and Multilingualism, Stockholm University) and as Senior Lecturer in Dutch.
Since 2017 I am working fulltime as a Senior Lecturer in Dutch. In my research I am interested in studying how children are represented and depicted ideologically in different types of (translated) multimodal texts. My research interests include multimodal studies, multimodal discourse analysis, visual communication, systemic functional linguistics, semiotic landscapes, spatial discourse analysis, (descriptive) translation studies, intercultural communication, localization and childhood studies.
Transnational mediation and circulation of Dutch language literature on Instagram: literary branding, self-mediation and bookstagram
Ongoing 2025-2026
In this project I analyse how Dutch language authorships circulate on Instagram and which affordances the platform offers for literary actors such as authors, publishers and literary influencers to (self-)mediate their work in transnational ways.
Born translated? Transnational circulation of metamodern Millennials through mediating networks and social media.
Publication expected in 2026
In this project I work together with Dr. Alexa Stoicescu (Bucharest university) to study the transnational circulation of Dutch languge metamodern authors such as Lukas Rijneveld, Lize Spit, Hanna Bervoets, Simone Atangana Bekono and Eva Meijers. Remarkable for this young genereation of authors is that they circulated transnationally relatively fast after their debut, both to central and more peripheral literary languages, resembling the concept of 'born translated' put forward by Walkowitz (2015). With a starting point in translation sociology, we study the mediating networks formed by institutionas and agents that are of interest for the translation and circulation of the authors in case. We pay specific focus to the Swedish and the Rumanian translation and reception context. Furthernore we examine the mediating role of social media, looking at literary influencers and the self-mediation of the authors through social media.
Dutch Literature in Translation (DLIT) and IConTxt
2021 - 2026, ongoing
International collaboration with researchers and students in Dutch Studies from 12 universities. Project coordinators: Herbert Van Uffelen (University of Vienna) and Małgorzata Dowlaszewicz (University of Wroclaw). With support from Nederlandse Taalunie.
In this project we collaborate with colleagues and students in Dutch Studies to maintain and further develop The Digital Library and Bibliography of Dutch Literature in Translation (DLBT).
Binnenlandse vogels, buitenlandse nesten: Uitgevers van vertaalde Nederlandstalige literatuur in relatie tot het Nederlandse en Vlaamse letterenbeleid.
May 2020 - Oktober 2022; publication expected in 2026.
International collaboration with researchers in Dutch Studies. Project coordinators: Jack McMartin (Leuven University) and Paola Gentile (University of Trieste). With support from Nederlandse Taalunie.
In this international project we study transnational flows of Dutch Language authors in translation. Together with Annika Johansson (SU) I study the cultural transfer process (incl. reception and translation) for the Flemish author Bart Moeyaert in Sweden. Specific focus is on the influence of literary institutions such as the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award (Alma), cultural mediators such as the Flemish Literature Fund, but also other actors in the cultural network established in and through the transnational transfer process.
Keywords: reception studies, translation studies, translation sociology, transnational flows, Bart Moeyaert, Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award
Semiotics of hair. Meanings of otherness, silence and social exclusion but also motherhood and empowerment in Kitty Crowther’s picture book "Mère Méduse".
In this project, I analyze how hair is used as a semiotic resource to express meanings of otherness, silence and social exclusion, but also motherhood and empowerment, in the picture book “Mère Méduse” (2014) by Belgian picture book artist Kitty Crowther.
Keywords: multimodality, social semiotics, picture books, meanings of hair
Global media for children? A multimodal analysis of dubbed children's animation.
Avslutat 2019-2022
Collaboration with: Annika Johansson (SU) and Reglindis De Ridder (SU)
In this project we aim to analyse the Swedish and Dutch dubbings of the animated Disney series PJ Masks from a multimodal perspective with regards to depiction of child characters in terms of gender and diversity. We combine theoretical and methodological perspectives from AVT, descriptive translations studies, social semiotics and multimodal discourse analysis with insights from corpus linguistics.
In september 2019 we presented the first results for this project at the 9th Congress of the European Society for Translation Studies Living Translation - People, Processes, Products at Stellenbosch University in South Africa.
Keywords: animated series, Disney, globalization, dubbing, multimodality, social semiotics, descriptive translation studies, corpus analysis, PJ Masks
Pettson och Findus go glocal.
Avslutat 2017-2019
Recontextualization of images and multimodal analysis of simultaneous action in Dutch and French translations. Samarbetsprojekt med Charlotte Lindgren, Högskolan Dalarna.
Keywords: multimodality, social semiotics, translation studies, picture books
Multimodala texter och lärande i högre utbildning
Avslutat 2016-2018
Samarbetsprojekt mellan Stockholms universitet/ Örebro universitet och Kapstadens universitet. Finansiärer: National Research Foundation (Sydafrika) och STINT (Sverige). Projektledare i Sverige: Anders Björkvall vid Örebro universitet.
Avslutat 2016-2017
Medborgarforskningsprojekt om lokala anslagstavlor som initierades inom ramen för Forskarfredag 2016. Samarbetsprojekt mellan forskare vid Stockholms universitet, Örebro universitet och Göteborgs universitet. Initierades av Vetenskap och Allmänhet inom ramen för Horizon 2020.
Forskningsprojekt