Clive Scott

Clive Scott is a British scholar of modern languages and translation studies. He is emeritus Professor of European Literature at the University of East Anglia (UEA) and a Fellow of the British Academy. His work spans French poetry, comparative poetics, photography and its relationship with writing, and the philosophy and practice of literary translation.

Early life and education Scott was educated at Bishop's Stortford College (1956–1961) and later attended St John's College, Oxford, where he earned degrees in French and German (MA, 1965), General and Comparative Literature (MPhil, 1967), and a DPhil in 1975. His doctoral thesis focused on comparative versification, specifically the role of line-endings in fixed forms and free verse.

He also chaired course-validating committees for several external institutions and served as acting director of the British Centre for Literary Translation (2003–2004). From 2004 to 2005, he was Head of the School of Literature and Creative Writing.

He has held editorial or advisory positions with a number of publications and organizations, including Parnasse, New Comparison, the British Centre for Literary Translation, Second Sight, the Half-Tone Press, Open Book Publishers, Thinking Verse, and the Transcript series published by Legenda. He served as President of the Modern Humanities Research Association from 2014 to 2015.

Scholarly work and research Scott's early scholarship focused on comparative poetics and versification, particularly in relation to French poetry.

In the late 1990s, Scott turned to the relationship between photography and writing, analyzing their different expressive modes and mutual interferences. and Street Photography: From Atget to Cartier-Bresson (2007) reflect an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on literary theory, visual studies, and cultural history.

His book Channel Crossings: French and English Poetry in Dialogue 1550–2000 (2002) traces reciprocal influences between poetic traditions and was awarded the R.H. Gapper Book Prize in 2003. Literary Translation and the Rediscovery of Reading (2012), based on his 2010 Clark Lectures at the University of Cambridge, emphasizes the act of translation as a mode of critical and creative reading. Translating the Perception of Text (2012), which received a Gapper commendation, explores the perceptual and cognitive dimensions of translation. Scott's more recent theoretical work incorporates ecological and phenomenological frameworks, influenced by thinkers such as Henri Bergson, Jakob von Uexküll, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

Selected publications

Books authored

Edited volumes