Staff Profile

Background

I have been Senior Lecturer in French and Translation Studies at Newcastle University since 2023, and previously Lecturer since my appointment in 2016. Before coming to Newcastle, I worked as a Lecturer in French Studies at Nottingham Trent University and as a Graduate Teaching Assistant at the University of Manchester, where I also completed my doctorate in French Studies, funded by a French Graduate Scholarship.

Education

PhD in French Studies, University of Manchester.

MSc in Translation and Technology, Heriot-Watt University.

BA Hons French and German (1st Class with Distinction in spoken French), University of Strathclyde.

Esteem Indicators

I have had the pleasure of being invited to share my research at the following events.

Keynote speaker:

'Translating Rape' at the 18th International Postgraduate Conference in Translation and Interpreting (IPCITI 2025), University of Warwick, UK, 13-14 November 2025.

'Embodied Alterities: Translating Women's Erotic Writing in French' at the ‘Pornography in Babel’ conference, University of Antwerp, Belgium, 23-24 October 2025.

'Rethinking (Self)Translation in (Trans)national Contexts' postgraduate conference, University of Manchester, 7 June 2019.

Invited speaker: 

Translation Studies seminar series, University of Edinburgh, 22 January 2020.

Translation Studies seminar, University College Cork, 16 September 2019.

Translation and Gender seminar, Cambridge Conversations in Translation Research Group, University of Cambridge, 8 May 2018.

Translating Feminism seminar, University of Glasgow, 16 January 2017.

My opinion is regularly sought to provide peer review for journal articles, book proposals and full manuscripts. I have provided reviews for the following journals: Feminist Translation Studies, MHRA, New Voices in Translation Studies, Target, Translating and Interpreting, Translation Studies, The Translator; and academic presses: Bloomsbury, Brill, Oxford University Press, Routledge and Peter Lang.

Responsibilities

Since September 2025, I have been the Co-Director (with Dr Yalta Chen) of Postgraduate Research in SML.

I am also currently the Degree Programme Director (DPD) for the BA in Modern Languages, Translation and Interpreting.

From 2018-2025, I served as a Sexual Violence Liaison Officer for the University. In this role, I provided survivor-led, trauma-responsive support and information to students of all genders who had experienced sexual violence (including sexual harassment) whilst studying at the university. Part of the role also involved developing and delivering awareness training on issues such as consent and reporting sexual harassment and misconduct.

From 2017-2024, I was a member of SML's Equality, Diversity and Inclusion committee.

In 2018, I co-led the Language and Gender Inclusivity project in SML. This Faculty-funded project created a multilingual glossary to promote the use of gender inclusive terminology among our university community.

As a feminist translation studies scholar, my research interests lie in how female lived experience is articulated via processes of translation. My first monograph, Translating Transgressive Texts (Routledge 2023), explored how transgressive expressions of gender, sexuality and the body were translated both linguistically and paratextually in the work of contemporary women writers in French (Nelly Arcan, Nina Bouraoui, Nancy Huston, and Catherine Millet). I have also published numerous peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters examining the translation of transgressive and explicit women's writing on topics including sexuality and eroticism.

My current book project, Translating Rape, examines the cultural and linguistic flows via translation of survivors' testimonies concerning rape and sexual violence. It considers the complexities of translating traumatic texts, the politics of experiential knowledge, and the potential that translation offers for constructing networks of transnational feminist solidarity.

Combining feminist phenomenological perspectives on female lived experience with feminist translation theory, my other main area of research relates to the translation of Simone de Beauvoir’s philosophy. From 2020 to 2025, I served as Managing Editor of the award-winning, international journal Simone de Beauvoir Studies. With Julia Bullock (Emory University, USA), I edited a volume that explored the global translations of Beauvoir's germinal study on women, Le Deuxième Sexe, titled Translating Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex: Transnational Framing, Interpretation and Impact (Routledge 2023). I am also the sole editor of a volume on Beauvoir for Bloomsbury's 'Understanding Philosophy, Understanding Modernism' series. Understanding Beauvoir, Understanding Modernism (Bloomsbury 2026) considers Beauvoir as a philosophical interlocutor of modernism, exploring how her own writing illustrates an appreciation of modernist aesthetics and how her phenomenological existentialist philosophy offers us new ways to approach modernism.

Postgraduate Research Supervision

I am an experienced supervisor of PhD students and welcome proposals from prospective students working in the areas of contemporary women’s writing in French, feminist translation studies, queer translation studies, feminist theories, gender and sexuality studies, feminist philosophy, literary translation, and audiovisual translation. I also welcome queries from Visiting Postgraduate Research Students who wish to come to Newcastle for up to one year to work with me.

Completed PhD Theses:

Daisy Zijun Feng (second supervisor: Ya-Yun Chen): 'Investigating the Chinese Fan Subtitling of Lesbian Representation in Anglophone Audiovisual Texts: A Multimodal Case Study of Orange Is the New Black (2013-2019). Awarded 2025.

Olivia McCannon (co-supervisors: Sinead Morrissey and Tara Bergin) 'Living Translations of Poetry in the Anthropocene: From Louky Bersianik’s Maternative to The Lives of Z.' Awarded 2024.

Dariush Robertson (first supervisor: Yalta Ya-Yun Chen): 'Chinese to English Video Game Linguists and Culture Specific Items in the Translation of a Wuxia RPG: a controlled partial-localisation case study.' Awarded 2024.

Xueman Cao (second supervisor: Yalta Ya-Yun Chen): 'Translating Sexually Explicit Language in Popular Fiction from English into Chinese: Exploring Patterns and Strategies.' Awarded 2022.

Completed MLitt Theses:

Emily Armitage (co-supervisor: Fernando Beleza): 'Translating the Taboo: Exploring the translation of transgressive themes in Novas Cartas Portuguesas (1972).' Awarded 2023.

My current research students:

Mary-Jane Holmes (co-supervisors: Sinead Morrissey and Tara Bergin): 'A Girdle Round the Earth: Intertextual Crossings in the Translation of Verse Form'

Tianyu Yu (second supervisor: Ya-Yun Chen): 'Translating Women's Gender Roles in Moment in Peking'. 

Yixuan Deng (second supervisor: Ya-Yun Chen): 'Investigating the Writing and Translation of Chinese Women’s Embodied Experiences: A Transitivity-Based Study of Xiao Hong’s Sheng Si Chang (1935) and Hulanhe Zhuan (1941) and Their English Translations'.

Alex Li (second supervisor: Ya-Yun Chen): 'Subtitling Dialect Humour: Strategies, Stereotypes, and Reception'

Ailin Li (co-supervisor: Ya-Yun Chen): 'Reloading Herstories - A Multimodal Case Study on Female Representation in Video Game Localisation'

Zen Li (co-supervisor: Ya-Yun Chen): 'Habitus, culture and gender: a case study of Wilt l. Idema and his English translations of China’s four great folktales'

Florencia Frete (co-supervisor: Jo Robinson): 'Above and BeyONd: Developing and Evaluating New Approaches to Access for Opera North'

Visiting PGRs:

Xinyuan Yu. 'Feminism as Cross-border Knowledge: Gender, Nation, and Ideology in Translation, Appropriation and Reception of Western Feminist Theories in China (1919-1925).' The Chinese University of Hong Kong. March-June 2026.

Undergraduate Teaching (25/26)

Module leader for:

FRE4015 - From Experimental to Explicit: Translating Women's Writing in French

Contributor to:

TRI4002 - Translation Theory and Practice 3 (subtitling)

FRE4087 - Level D (HE further advanced) Translation and Interpreting

SML4099 - UG Dissertation/Translation Project

Postgraduate Teaching (25/26)

Contributor to:

SML8023 - The Language Industry: Professions, Processes and Society

SML7001 - Translation and Interpreting Studies

SML8098 - MA Dissertation

• Articles

  • Henry-Tierney P. Sex, Subjectivity and Situation: Nelly Arcan's Existential Phenomenological Autofiction. Life Writing 2026. Submitted.
  • Henry-Tierney P. Simone de Beauvoir the Memorialist: The Running Threads Connecting Us. Paragraph 2023, 46(2), 259-274.
  • Henry-Tierney P. Translating Sexual Awakening in Marie Darrieussecq's Clèves. L’Esprit Créateur 2020, 60(3), 6-18.
  • Henry-Tierney P. Simone de Beauvoir, Brigitte Bardot, and Back-Translation: The Trajectory of Beauvoir's Discourse on the ‘Eternal Feminine’. Translation and Literature 2020, 29(3), 338-354.
  • Henry-Tierney P. Marie Claire’s Transgressive Trio: Erotic Alterity in Christine Angot, Claire Castillon, and Tatiana de Rosnay. L'Esprit Créateur 2019, 59(3), 73-85.
  • Henry-Tierney P. Transgressive Textualities: Translating References to Gender, Sexuality and Corporeality in Nelly Arcan’s Putain and Paradis, clef en main. Canada and Beyond: A Journal of Canadian Literary and Cultural Studies 2013, 3(1-2), 161-179.

• Authored Book

  • Henry-Tierney P. Translating Transgressive Texts: Gender, Sexuality and the Body in Contemporary Women's Writing in French. Abingdon: Routledge, 2023.

• Book Chapters

  • Henry-Tierney P. Simone de Beauvoir, Brigitte Bardot and Back-Translation: The Trajectory of Beauvoir's Discourse on the 'Eternal Feminine'. In: Veronique Lane, ed. Literary Back-Translation. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2025.
  • Henry-Tierney P. Translating in Bad Faith? Articulations of Beauvoir's Existentialist Philosophy in the English Translations of Le Deuxième Sexe. In: Bullock J; Henry-Tierney P, ed. Translating Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex: Transnational Framing, Interpretation and Impact. Abingdon: Routledge, 2023, pp.171-183.
  • Bullock J, Henry-Tierney P. Introduction. In: Julia C. Bullock; Pauline Henry-Tierney, ed. Translating Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex Transnational Framing, Interpretation, and Impact. Abingdon: Routledge, 2023, pp.1-13.
  • Bullock JC, Henry-Tierney P. Epilogue: Translating Key Concepts in Le Deuxième Sexe: A Crosslinguistic Discussion. In: Julia C. Bullock; Pauline Henry-Tierney, ed. Translating Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex Transnational Framing, Interpretation, and Impact. Abingdon: Routledge, 2023, pp.220-245.
  • Henry-Tierney P. The Many Faces of Beauvoir: Paratranslated Materiality in Le Deuxième Sexe. In: Bracke, M; Bullock, J; Morris, P; Schulz, S, ed. Translating Feminism: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Text, Place and Agency. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021, pp.43-65.
  • Henry-Tierney P. At the Confluence of Queer and Translation: Subversions, Fluidities, and Performances. In: von Flotow, L; Kamal, H, ed. Routledge Handbook of Translation, Feminism and Gender. London: Routledge, 2020, pp.255-265.
  • Henry-Tierney P. Parameters, Thresholds and Liminal Spaces: Designing a Course on Sex, Gender and Translation. In: Toto, P; de Marco, M, ed. Gender Approaches in the Translation Classroom: Training the Doers. London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2019, pp.27-44.
  • Henry-Tierney P. The Whore and her Mother: Exploring Matrophobia in Nelly Arcan's Putain. In: Loic Bourdeau, ed. Horrible Mothers: Representations across Francophone North America. Lincoln, NE, USA: University of Nebraska Press, 2018.
  • Henry-Tierney P. The Translator and the Transgressive: Encountering Sexual Alterity in Catherine Millet’s La Vie Sexuelle de Catherine M. In: Castro O; Ergun E, ed. Feminist Translation Studies: Local and Transnational Perspectives. London: Routledge, 2017, pp.222-234.

• Edited Books

  • Henry-Tierney P, ed. Understanding Beauvoir, Understanding Modernism. Bloomsbury, 2026. Submitted.
  • Bullock J, Henry-Tierney P, ed. Translating Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex: Transnational Framing, Interpretation and Impact. Abingdon: Routledge, 2023.