I grew up in Hertfordshire. I did both my BA and graduate study in Cambridge (Trinity Hall); in 1978-79 I was Henry Fellow at Harvard University, and then won a scholarship to pursue research at the British Institute (University of London) in Paris. From 1981-1985 I worked on my PhD both in Cambridge and in Paris. For most of my career I have taught in France, first at the British Institute, and then at the American University in Paris and at the University of Paris X-Nanterre. After a year teaching in Poland,I took up a permanent (tenured) post as Maître de Conférences at the University of Tours in the Loire Valley, where I lived and worked for over thirty years, interspersed by teaching appointments and Visiting Fellowhips in the UK and the US.

I joined Brasenose in 2017, first as a lecturer, then as a stipendiary lecturer, specializing in French-English translation. Since I wrote my thesis on T.S.Eliot and French post-Symbolist poetics, I have led a double career as a university lecturer and a poet, critic, essayist, anthologist and translator. I have published several collections in English, and my poems have been translated into French, Polish, Spanish, Dutch, Italian and German. Recently I published a book of critical essays, ‘Chaos and the Clean Line: Writings on Franco-British Modernism’ (Cambridge/MHRA, Legenda, 2024). With co-translator Patrick McGuinness, my translation of Gilles Ortlieb (‘The Day’s Ration’, Arc, 2024) won the Scott-Moncrieff prize. I contribute poems, articles and reviews to critical journals like TLS, PN Review, London Magazine, etc.

As Stipendiary Lecturer in French, I teach the mandatory French Unseen and Set Text Translation papers to every year group over the four year course (year 3 is the year abroad). That way students have me as their teacher consistently from Prelims to Finals.

Translation is a discipline that goes far beyond a word-for-word rendering of any given text. Especially in the case of ‘expressive’ texts, such as extracts from modern fiction which forms the bulk of what we do, translation requires gifts relating to lexicon, register, tone, function, destination, period, as well as differing degrees of freedom or constraint, depending on the task in hand.

Following upon my book of critical writings (2024) I continue to contribute essays and articles on aspects of poetics and the visual arts in Modernism. In March this year (2025) I delivered the Wheeler public lecture for Modern Languages at Bristol University on ‘How to Translate Emotion’, and in July I delivered a paper at the Ezra Pound International Conference in Brunnenburg, Italy on Ezra Pound and the British architectural historian Adrian Stokes. I have also completed a new collection of poems; a preliminary pamphlet entitled ‘From the Safe Room’ is due from the Dare-Gale Press in 2026.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Romer

https://poetryarchive.org/poet/stephen-romer/

https://www.rlf.org.uk/posts/wa_episode288/