Esperança Bielsa holds a PhD in Sociology (University of Glasgow). She is currently Senior Lecturer at the Department of Sociology of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. In 2015 she was Senior Visiting Research Fellow at the Department of Sociology of the University of Sussex.
Before joining the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona with a Ramón y Cajal Fellowship in 2010, she was Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Leicester. She has also held positions as Research Fellow at Warwick University’s Centre for Translation and Comparative Cultural Studies, and as Research Fellow and Sociology Tutor at the University of Glasgow.

Her research interests are in the areas of the sociology of culture, the sociology of translation, globalisation and cosmopolitanism, Latin American culture and literature.

Esperança Bielsa is author of The Latin American Urban Crónica: Between Literature and Mass Culture (Lexington Books 2006) and of Cosmopolitanism and Translation: Investigations into the Experience of the Foreign (Routledge 2016), co-author (with Susan Bassnett) of Translation in Global News (Routledge 2009), and co-editor (with Christopher Hughes) of Globalisation, Political Violence and Translation (Palgrave Macmillan 2009). She has edited a special issue of the journal Papers. Revista de Sociologia on the theme 'Cosmopolitanism, Otherness, Translation' (2015). Her article 'Cosmopolitanism as Translation', published in Cultural Sociology 8(4), was the winner of the British Sociological Association/ Sage Prize for Innovation and Excellence 2015.

She is a member of the International Advisory Board of Jiao Tong Baker Centre for Translation and Intercultural Studies, Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, an associate member of the international research training network ARTIS (Advancing Research in Translation and Interpreting Studies) and a member of the research group GIR Traducción, Ideología, Cultura of the University of Salamanca.