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James Womack is an Affiliated Lecturer in the Spanish and Portuguese Section. He teaches Spanish and Russian translation and Spanish and English literature; his research focuses on literary translation, in particular the translation of poetry, and the various ideological influences which feed into a translation.

He is an active translator and poet himself, and has published three volumes of poems, most recently Homunculus (Carcanet, 2020), as well as translations from writers including Vladimir Mayakovsky, Silvina Ocampo, Manuel Vilas, and a number of Soviet-era science fiction authors and contemporary Spanish novelists. He has most recently produced a version of Spanish Nobel Prize winner Camilo José Cela's The Hive for NYRB Classics. His monograph on the translations of W.H. Auden is under contract with Oxford University Press and will be published shortly.

His research interests include the influence of Russian literature on English literature of the 1930s; the intersection of translation and human rights, with particular reference to dissident Russian poets of the late- and post-Soviet periods, and the poetry of institutionalised writers, especially the work of Spanish poet Leopoldo María Panero