Jerwood Bank 2008 – Siobhan Davies Dance

Susan Hitch
Linguist and Broadcaster
As an academic, Susan has written on Alfred the Great’s ninth century programme of translating important books from Latin into Anglo-Saxon English, and on women’s writing in the Renaissance. But her curiosity about languages and how language itself works goes back further in her own life, to a childhood in Japan, Cuba, Greece and Germany, travelling between places and between language; later she lived in Algeria, Brazil and Poland.

Language is the means by which we place ourselves in a time and culture, whether we’re learning – as children, or migrants, or travellers – or speaking a language which is already our own. Our language gives us an identity which usually feels as natural to us as the breath we use to speak it. And yet we can also use it to ask questions about who we are, to reconsider, remake and relearn. That has been the focus of Susan’s work as an academic: King Alfred using newly translated books to build national identity, the literate Protestant women of Seventeenth Century England recognising the power of writing and using it distinctively. Questions of language and identity are not only historical and academic: Susan continually meets these questions in the human rights-based work of the Sigrid Rausing Trust of which she is a trustee.

 Tags: 4. Week four/ Artist talks/ Leaders and Artists