Muira McCammon is a Beinecke Scholar pursuing an MA in translation studies at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. After graduating Phi Beta Kappa with a B.A. in international relations/French from Carleton College, she worked last year as a Fulbright English lecturer in eastern Turkey.
While there, she took Turkish lessons from a Qur'anic translation theorist, tried to pick up some Pashto through her Afghan friends, and drew upon her knowledge of Arabic when in a pickle. Today, her research interests lie at the intersection of law, politics, and translation, primarily focusing on prison libraries and the complexities of multilingual cyberspace. She spends much of her time investigating the role of translation in cultures of confinement and has a piece (forthcoming and co-authored with Prof. Ilan Stavans of Amherst College) in the Kenyon Review Online about her research on the Guantanamo Bay Detainee Library.