Born and raised in South Philadelphia, Lawrence Venuti majored in English at Temple in the early 1970s and then received his doctorate at Columbia in 1980, when he returned to Temple as an assistant professor. He is currently professor of English. A prolific translator from Italian and French, he has rendered works of art criticism, literature, philosophy, and sociology by such authors as Nicolas Perrot d’Ablancourt, Dino Buzzati, Jacques Derrida, Antonia Pozzi, and Aldo Rossi. His work has been supported by grants and fellowships from such agencies as the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He has been a visiting professor at the University of California at Irvine, Katholieke Universiteit in Leuven, the Monterey Institute for International Studies, and the University of Iowa. In 1999 he held a Fulbright Senior Lectureship in translation studies at the Universitat de Vic in Spain.

His publications include Rethinking Translation: Discourse, Subjectivity, Ideology (1992), The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (1995), The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference (1998), and The Translation Studies Reader (2nd ed., 2004). His articles, reviews, and translations have appeared in such publications as Comparative Literature, Critical Inquiry, the New York Times Book Review, Radical Philosophy, the Times Literary Supplement, and the Yale Journal of Criticism. His current project explores the relations between translation and interpretation so as to study the impact of translated texts on canon formation, disciplinary divisions, cultural movements, and political struggles.