Lieve Jooken is associate professor at the Department of Translation, Interpreting and Communication at Ghent University, where she teaches courses on British culture and society, academic writing, and an introduction to translation studies. She is one of the coordinators of the departmental research group TRACE (Translation and Culture) and is a member of the UGent-VUB Alliance research group on literary translation, CLIV (Centrum voor Literatuur in Vertaling / Centre for Literature in Translation).
She obtained her PhD from KU Leuven in 1996. Her doctoral research examined the development of linguistic concepts within the context of the eighteenth-century origin-of-language debate, focusing on works by James Burnet and Adam Smith. Her current research explores the translation and cultural transfer of French and British philosophical discourse during the Enlightenment (including authors such as Locke, Hume, La Mettrie, and Rousseau), with particular attention to processes of acculturation, the translation of paratexts, and the translator’s mediating role. She has been a referee for Studi Lockiani and Parallèles, and co-organised the conference The Original and its Metamorphoses. Tracing the translator in the long eighteenth century (1660-1830) in 2022.
Her other research interests include translation in (post)colonial contexts, notably the translation of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century transatlantic slave narratives. She is also a working group member of COST Action CA23144, ESIND, Europe's Representations of India: Texts, Images, and Encounters.