Education

• Ph.D. York University, Communication & Culture
• M.A. York University, Communication & Culture
• B.A. Boğaziçi University, History

Research

My first book, The Provincial and The Postcolonial in Cultural Texts from Late Modern Turkey, explores Turkey’s complicated relationship to modernity and its status within the new global order by tracing the ambivalent ways in which taşra (the provinces/the provincial) gets constituted in contemporary Turkish cinema and literature. Drawing from the insights of poststructuralism, postcolonial theory, psychoanalysis and critical theory, I bring the nationally-specific concept of taşra into dialogue with a set of transnational problematics. Focusing on taşra in the Turkish context enables us to rethink the problem of center and margin in the contemporary world more generally and helps us see how the metropolitan center(s) produces its “provinces” to facilitate domination of what it disowns and disparages as “margin.”

I’m currently working on a new project on border narratives and aesthetics that brings together theoretical insights from diverse fields, including film and media studies, critical border studies, security and surveillance studies, postcolonial studies, and forensic architecture. In this transnational cultural studies project, I examine a variety of media, such as fiction films, documentaries, novels, new media/multi-media art which articulate territorial borders with the b/ordering of gender, race, class, language, temporality, and more-than-human worlds. These are texts that address in creative ways both the debilitating and liberating aspects of border-crossings. The multiple media forms I examine in this project also allow me to probe their distinct aesthetic capabilities, particularly in imagining/enacting border-crossings that offer alternatives to the dominant representational regimes of securitization and humanitarianism.  

Teaching

• Special Topics in Global Media
• Film and Media Analysis
• Middle East on Screen
• Special Topics in Fiction

Areas of Specialization

• Global Media and Literature
• Transnational Cultural Studies
• Critical Border Studies
• Turkish Cinema, Literature and Television
• Cinemas of the Middle East
• Postcolonial Theory
• Psychoanalysis

Publications

• “Creaturely Worlding: Ali Abbasi’s Adaptation of Border” in Film as World Literature, ed. Robin Truth Goodman (Bloomsbury Publishing, forthcoming in 2025)
• The Provincial and The Postcolonial in Cultural Texts from Late Modern Turkey (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022)
• “Unsettling the Metaphor: The Failure of Liberal Hybridity in Fatih Akin’s Crossing The Bridge,” New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film 12: 3 (2014)