World Literature Webinar Series 2026 : “Unsettling Time-Lag in Modernist Literatures from Ottoman and Post-Ottoman Landscapes” by Hülya Adak — Online, 25 February 2026
World Literature Webinar Series 2026
Assoc. Prof. Hülya Adak (Free University of Berlin / Orient-Institut Istanbul (OII) & Max Weber Stiftung).
“Unsettling Time-Lag in Modernist Literatures from Ottoman and Post-Ottoman Landscapes”
Assoc. Prof. Hülya Adak (Free University of Berlin / Orient-Institut Istanbul (OII) & Max Weber Stiftung).
“Unsettling Time-Lag in Modernist Literatures from Ottoman and Post-Ottoman Landscapes”
Adak proposes to map out fiction within Ottoman and Post-Ottoman literary landscapes that illustrates a contemporaneous movement with European and Anglo-American modernists. Analyzing works from 1909-1960, she illustrates how to overcome the limits of theoretical discussions in literary and cultural studies that use European and Anglo-American modernists as the sole harbingers of narrative experimentation and critical political intervention. Wary further of “omnipotent definitions” (Shih 18) mapped onto non-European literatures (a term she will also contest), she challenges the Eurocentric biases in global literary modernism, defying the study of Ottoman and Post-Ottoman authors as “late bloomers,” according to which non-European literatures lag behind European masterpieces in narrative ingenuity. Lastly, she illustrates methodological shifts that accompany the mapping of Ottoman and Post-Ottoman aesthetic experiments in the early decades of the twentieth century onto the history of global literary history as contemporaneous with European modernists.
Date: 25 February 2026 (Wednesday)
Time: 18:00 Istanbul (UTC+3)
(16:00 Paris · 15:00 London · 10:00 New York)
Hülya Adak is Senior Fellow at the Orient Institut Istanbul der Max Weber Stiftung and Visiting Professor of Gender Studies at the Margherita von Brentano Zentrum at Freie Universität Berlin. Between 2019-2022, she was the Director of SU Gender (Sabancı University’s Gender and Women’s Studies Center). Since 2018, she has served as Professor of Ottoman and Turkish Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin. Between 2001-2024, she was Assistant and Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Gender Studies at Sabancı University. She is the recipient of the Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship for Experienced Researchers and Newton Grant (British Academy/with Murat Akser). Her articles in the fields of gender studies, memory and trauma studies, empire studies and nationalism, history of human rights, literature, theater, and film studies have been published in prominent journals. Her recent works include “Aesthetic Interventions to Gender-Based Violence and Sexual Violence” (Special Issue of the European Journal of Women’s Studies, 2025, with Julia Garraio); Critical Perspectives on Genocide: History, Politics and Aesthetics of 1915 (Routledge, 2023, with Müge Göçek and Ron Suny), Mapping Gender: What’s New and What’s Ahead in Ottoman and Turkish Studies (Max Weber Stiftung Publications 2022, with Richard Wittmann); Performing Turkishness: Politics of Theater in Turkey and its Diasporas, (Special Issue of Comparative Drama, 2018, with R. Ertuğ Altınay), Halide Edib and Political Violence: The Armenian Atrocities, Dictatorship and Nonviolence (Bilgi University Press, 2016, in Turkish), Hundert Jahre Türkei: Von Revolten, Traeumen und Hoffnungen (Unionsverlag Zurich, 2010, with Erika Glassen) and So ist das, meine Schöne… (Orlanda Verlag Berlin, with Ayşe Gül Altınay, Nilgün Bayraktar and Esin Düzel). Adak is also working on the book Survivor Archives (with Melanie Tanielian and Erdağ Göknar) that received Duke University Franklin Humanities Institute’s Book Manuscript Award (2021) and is the Co-Editor (with Özlem Öğüt Yazıcıoğlu) of the “Special Issue Ecological Imaginaries in Turkish Literature, Drama and Film.”
Moderator: Dr. Simla Doğangün (CNRS–EHESS–Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne)
Event Coordinator: Dr. Seda Öz
For questions, please contact: sedaoz@udel.edu
This event is hosted by the University of Delaware, Department of English.
OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
Chargé de diffusion scientifique (6 février 2026). World Literature Webinar Series 2026 : “Unsettling Time-Lag in Modernist Literatures from Ottoman and Post-Ottoman Landscapes” by Hülya Adak — Online, 25 February 2026. IISMM. Consulté le 20 juillet 2026 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/15n0l
