The UAB opens the academic year of the university system with an inaugural lecture by translator Mary Ann Newman
American-born translator and cultural diplomat Mary Ann Newman will be giving the inaugural lecture of the university system's new 2026/27 academic year. The ceremony will take place on Friday 2 October in the conference hall of the UAB Rectorat building. It will include the presence of representatives of all Catalan universities and will be presided over by Rector Javier Lafuente and Catalan Minister for Research and Universities Núria Montserrat. The event will also serve to launch the UAB's themed year dedicated to Catalan culture. The ceremony will be streamed live of the UAB's YouTube channel.
The UAB will host the event marking the start of the academic year for the entire Catalan university system on Friday 2 October at 12:00 noon. The event will be attended by the rectors of Catalan universities and top institutional officials, led by Minister for Universities Núria Montserrat. It will also include the presentation of the Jaume Vicens Vives awards and the Maria Encarna Sanahuja Yll commendations, which are awarded for teaching excellence and the incorporation of a gender perspective in Catalan universities.
Mary Ann Newman, American translator and specialist in Catalan literature and culture, will deliver the inaugural lecture, titled "Catalan Culture Without Borders". The ceremony will kick off the UAB’s thematic year dedicated to Catalan culture and will also serve as the official academic year opening event for the entire Catalan university system.
In addition to this inaugural lecture, the new edition of the Science Carriage and other institutional activities will centre on the multiple facets of Catalan culture, the promotion of which the UAB has been strongly committed to since its origins to the present day. The University thus aims to promote, within the university community, the open character of a culture that has become a factor for coexistence, something highly relevant in the current context of threats to democratic values and the rise of identity extremisms.
Mary Ann Newman, lecturer, translator and cultural liaison
Mary Ann Newman was born in New York. She is an essayist, translator, and cultural diplomat who has dedicated her professional life to studying Catalan culture and bridging the academic and cultural spheres of Catalonia and the United States—specifically New York. She approaches her work from a perspective inherent to a translator: viewing the two cultures she inhabits and studies, each through the lens of the other.
As a literary translator, she won the Josep Carner Prize for Literary Theory from the Institute for Catalan Studies in 1998 with a doctoral thesis on Eugeni d'Ors, the same year that the Government of Catalonia awarded her the Saint George's Cross. With her translations, Newman has brought prominent works and authors from the Catalan canon to the Anglophone world: the masterpiece of Josep Maria de Sagarra (Private Life), works by Quim Monzó, Joan Fuster, Xavier Rubert de Ventós, Josep Carner and Vicens Vives. In 2022, she was awarded the Ramon Llull International Prize for Catalan Studies and Linguistic Diversity.
Building institutional foundations for transnational exchange has been another constant in her career. From 2006 to 2011, she directed the Catalan Center at NYU under the auspices of the Institut Ramon Llull, and she is the director of the Farragut Fund for Catalan Culture in the United States.