Dr. Rainer Schulte
- Professor of Arts and Humanities
- Founders Professor
The University of Texas System supports the professorship. Schulte was appointed to the position in December 2022.
“The practice and theory of translation open the door to a successful interaction with other cultures. Only through the act of translation can a meaningful communication among people and nations be achieved.”
Dr. Rainer Schulte has been a leader in raising the visibility of translation in the United States and has been instrumental in promoting literary translation at other universities. He is the founder of the Rainer Schulte Center for Translation Studies, named in his honor by Richard Kurjan MA’82, and he is co-founder of the American Literary Translators Association, a national nonprofit organization which also supports the work of literary translators and advances the art of literary translation.
Schulte is a specialist in comparative literature, in contemporary international literature, and in interdisciplinary studies in the arts and humanities. He has translated poetry and fiction of writers from Latin America, Germany, and France. His most recent monograph, Traveling Between Languages: The Geography of Translation and Interpretation, demonstrates how translation methodologies can promote the reading and interpretation of literary and humanistic texts and foster interdisciplinary thinking and research.
Schulte was the chair of the jury for the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize for the best translation of a German work published in 2007, funded by the Foreign Office of Germany and awarded by the Chicago Goethe Institute.
In 2009, Schulte received the Linda Gaboriau Translation Award in honor of his significant contribution to the art of literary translation and to literature in North America from the Banff International Translation Centre, and in 2010 he delivered the Polykarp Kusch Lecture at UT Dallas on “Life as Translation.”
Schulte attended Dickinson College, earned his master’s degree in English and French from the University of Mainz, and his PhD in comparative literature from the University of Michigan.