Biography
I graduated from Worcester College, Oxford with a BA in German and Philosophy in 2019 (First Class), before completing my MA in Translation Studies at the University of Sheffield (Distinction). After my MA, I spent a year working at a sixth form college in an outreach / pastoral capacity, before returning to Oxford in 2021 to begin my DPhil in Medieval and Modern Languages, for which I was successfully examined in February 2025.
Research
My doctoral research examined English translations of a selection of German language novels, from Irmgard Keun’s Das kunstseidene Mädchen to Sasha Marianna Salzmann’s Außer sich. I focused on consciousness narratives whose authors have attempted to (and sometimes struggled to) articulate the mind of a gendered subject, and investigated how, and how successfully, these attempts have been translated into English.
My current research investigates comparative translation analysis as a methodological approach, particularly as a way of hearing minoritized and marginalized voices in translated works.
Teaching
I teach a variety of papers on the undergraduate German course: Prelims III (poetry and drama) and IV (prose and film), as well as a broad range of Paper VIII modules ranging from Goethe, the buergerliches Trauerspiel, the ‘Postwar Restoration Frenzy’ in Austria, and Representations of Trauma.
I am particularly passionate about teaching Unseen Translation from German at all levels and in a variety of contexts, with classes focusing on the translation of wordplay, children’s books, prose poetry, and on translation technologies such as subtitling and simultaneous interpreting. Recently my students and I held an in-class AI vs Human translation event, prompting conversations about what is creative and distinct about texts translated by humans.
Publications
‘Mind Your Language! Profanity and Promiscuity in Two English Translations of Irmgard Keun’s Das kunstseidene Mädchen (1932)’, Journal of Languages, Texts and Society, 7 (2024) [available from: lts-vol.-7-final-i-parkinson.pdf (nottingham.ac.uk)]
‘Speaking Your Mind: The Translation of Orality in Marlen Haushofer’s Prose’, German Life and Letters 78.4 (2025) [available from: http://doi.org/10.1111/glal.70001]
‘Man! I Feel Like a Woman: Translating the Third-Person Impersonal Pronoun in Irmgard Keun’s Early Prose’, Oxford German Studies, 54.2 (2025) [available from: https://doi.org/10.1080/00787191.2025.2487759]
Bernhard Zimmerman ‘Philology and poetry: the literary legacies of Nietzsche and Rohde’, trans. by Isabel Parkinson, in Poetry and Poetics, Greek and Beyond: Essays in Honour of M. S. Silk, ed. by Fiona Macintosh and David Ricks (London: Routledge, 2025)
