Uganda is a translation studies scholar whose work focuses on the cultural and intellectual history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her research examines how translation and interpretation shaped Sinological and colonial knowledge across the British Empire, China, and the wider Sinosphere. Yet by the very nature of their work, interpreters were expected to remain invisible, subordinating their own voices to the sources they rendered. Her central aim is to recover the voices, vocations, and virtues of these interpreters, whose significance has long been overshadowed by the celebrated figures of empire.
At OCLW, she is working on two books exploring how interpreters made history and built institutional knowledge between the 1850s and the 1950s. She believes that scholarship demands a storyteller's skill and a keen grasp of human nature, a conviction that makes the Centre a natural home for her research.
