Teaching
I teach undergraduate and graduate courses in the areas of Postcolonial Studies, Modern Turkish Literature, and American Literature. My teaching focuses on the historical, cultural, and theoretical contexts of literary texts, encouraging students to engage critically with literature across different periods, geographies, and intellectual traditions.
Courses
Postcolonial Literature and Multiculturalism
Postcolonial literature refers to literary works that were produced and take as their subject matter the encounters between colonizers and the colonized. More commonly, however, it designates the contact that European colonizers established with the rest of the world over the last four hundred years. Since this period witnessed major paradigm shifts, such as the rise of humanism, the Enlightenment, and the making of modernity, the attempt to universalize and disseminate certain ideas brought questions of cultural relativity and power to the forefront. The primary aim of this course is therefore to familiarize students with a representative chronology of Anglophone postcolonial literature and with the critical terms commonly used to examine such works, while also introducing them to the latest discussions in the field of postcolonial studies. At a more specific level, this course will serve as a joint experiment in exploring the affinities and organic ties between the novel as a genre and postcolonial forms of literary expression. Accordingly, our reading list will also include texts on the theory of the novel.
Turkish Literature in a Comparative Context
Postcolonial literature refers to literary works that were produced and take as their subject matter the encounters between colonizers and the colonized. More commonly, however, it designates the contact that European colonizers established with the rest of the world over the last four hundred years. Since this period witnessed major paradigm shifts, such as the rise of humanism, the Enlightenment, and the making of modernity, the attempt to universalize and disseminate certain ideas brought questions of cultural relativity and power to the forefront. The primary aim of this course is therefore to familiarize students with a representative chronology of Anglophone postcolonial literature and with the critical terms commonly used to examine such works, while also introducing them to the latest discussions in the field of postcolonial studies. At a more specific level, this course will serve as a joint experiment in exploring the affinities and organic ties between the novel as a genre and postcolonial forms of literary expression. Accordingly, our reading list will also include texts on the theory of the novel.
Contemporary American Literature
This course examines American fiction from the postwar era to the early twenty-first century, focusing on how literary form and narrative voice respond to shifting social, cultural, and historical conditions. Beginning with the postwar conformity of the 1950s and the countercultural movements that challenged it, the course moves into the Civil Rights era and the emergence of new literary voices that foreground questions of race, gender, and social transformation. The course then explores the experimental and skeptical narratives associated with postmodern fiction, including fragmented storytelling, narrative indeterminacy, and representations of dislocated subjectivities. Later sections turn to late twentieth-century fiction that reflects minimalist prose, domestic realism, and an intensified focus on everyday life and interpersonal tensions. The course also addresses the rise of Indigenous and multicultural literatures that revisit colonial histories and challenge dominant national narratives. Concluding with twenty-first-century multicultural and transnational fiction, the course examines themes of diaspora, identity, and cultural memory. Together, literary texts and related cultural materials illuminate how American fiction across the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries reimagines national myths, identity, and belonging.