About Me

I am currently a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Postdoctoral Fellow (MSCA) at the Gender and Women’s Studies Center of Excellence (SU Gender) at Sabanci University. I received my Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Washington University in St. Louis.

My dissertation entitled "Trauma, Survival, and Survivance in Contemporary Anglophone and Turkish Literature: Materiality Beyond Mind” investigates the representation of violence in post-Apartheid South African and contemporary Turkish literatures, focusing on the ways in which novels from these two literary fields configure trauma, particularly trauma that results from state-sanctioned, authoritarian, or colonialist violence. My work seeks to decenter trauma theory’s prevailing conception of the traumatized, self-sufficient, hermetic subject to consider the ways in which trauma materializes in non-Western contexts as a larger social, material, and affective matrix. I conduct my work in an exemplary comparative manner by juxtaposing (but not conflating) literatures, histories, and cultural contexts not often brought together; in this way, I contribute to the scholarship on both global Anglophone and Turkish literatures and at the same time offer a synthetic, comparative argument that reaches beyond them.
 

As a comparatist literary scholar, I specialize in contemporary world literature, cultural trauma and memory studies, gender and sexuality studies, postcolonial theory, 20th and 21st-century literature, ecofeminism, and environmental humanities. My main research and teaching interests spans from critical theory, global literatures to ecofeminism and environmental humanities. Over the past years, my research has been supported by the Fulbright Ph.D. Scholarship, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Seminars, the Marie Curie Fellowship, the COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) Action, The Open Society Foundation, and the IWL (The Institute for World Literature) program. 

My work has appeared in journals such as European Review, The Journal of World Literature (BRILL), Intertexts, as well as edited volumes including The Routledge Companion to Literature and Trauma; Animals, Plants, and Landscapes: An Ecology of Turkish Literature and Film; Women’s Subaltern Studies; Mapping World Anglophone Literatures. I am currently working on my manuscript (under contract with Routledge within the series in Routledge Studies in Comparative Literature) on the poetics and politics of ecological witnessing and nonhuman storytelling in world literature.

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My research and teaching are shaped by values of diversity, equity, and inclusion. I am committed to making higher education accessible, inspiring, and a tool for social justice for all students. In addition to my fields of study, I also incorporate my background in translation studies into my teaching practice and understand translation as a vibrant tool to make cross-border traveling of knowledge production possible.