Important Announcement about the SISU Baker Centre
Dear friends and colleagues,
I am writing to let you know that I am stepping down as Director of the SISU Baker Centre for Translation and Intercultural Studies, Shanghai International Studies University, with effect from 1 January 2025. The Centre will then cease to exist, at my request, but the individual activities undertaken under its auspices will continue to run separately at the Centre for Translation, Hong Kong Baptist University. HKBU is the natural home for the Martha Cheung Award, and has a long experience of co-running the Translation Research Summer School with the University of Manchester, UCL and the University of Edinburgh in the past.
It has been an honour and a privilege to lead a well supported Centre that bears my name, something I have never asked for but have very much enjoyed being involved in. Thanks to unwavering and extensive support from Professor Kaibao Hu and his past and current team, particularly Professor Yifan Zhu (Jiao Tong University), Professor Qiang Geng (SISU), and Dr Kyung Hye Kim (Dongkuk University, South Korea), I have been able to work with some of the most gifted intellectuals in our field – as members of the Advisory Board, the Martha Cheung Award Committee and Peer College, the Translation Research Summer School, and the International Research School for Media Translation and Digital Culture. Since its founding at Jiao Tong University in 2017, and later move to Shanghai International Studies University, the Centre has conferred six Martha Cheung Awards and 12 runner-up certificates, and ran five highly successful editions of the summer schools: three of the Media and Digital Culture School (2019, 2021, 2023) and two of the Translation Research Summer School (2022, 2024).
My reasons for stepping down are entirely personal: I am at an age and stage of career now where I need to cut down on long term commitments and spend more time with my family and loved ones. I am extremely grateful to Professor Hu for his trust and continued support, and to all colleagues and supporters of the Martha Cheung Award initiative and the Summer Schools, past and present, for giving me the opportunity to lead such a prestigious Centre. I am also confident that the work invested in the two Summer Schools and the Award will continue to bear fruit through the support of colleagues at the Centre for Translation, Hong Kong Baptist University, to build on the great achievements of my late friend Martha Cheung, and to honour her memory at the same institution and the field at large.
In the meantime, I will continue to work closely with Professor Hu and Shanghai International Studies University in other capacities, in particular as member of the Advisory Board of the Institute of Corpus Studies and Applications, and to collaborate with colleagues at the Institute on other, one-off activities that do not require long term commitment.
I would like to thank everyone who has contributed to the success of the Centre over the past eight years and hope that they will extend the same generous and professional levels of support to our colleagues at Hong Kong Baptist University over the months and years to come.
Best regards,
—
Mona Baker
Co-cordinator, Genealogies of Knowledge Research Network
Affiliate Professor, Centre for Sustainable Healthcare Education (SHE), University of Oslo
Honorary Dean, GSTI, Beijing Foreign Studies University
Signatory to the Academic Commitment for Palestine
New, Diamond Open Access Transdisciplinary Journal: Encounters in Translation
Sustainability & Health (SHE) Corpus: http://www.shecorpus.net
Genealogies of Knowledge Research Network: https://genealogiesofknowledge.net/research-network/