PD Dr. Elena Furlanetto (Universität Duisburg-Essen): “Turkish American Literature Now and Then: Daily Life of a Discipline Inside, Outside, and Between Empires” 

Thursday, July 02, 2026, 2-4 p.m. (c.t.), SP17/00.13 (Schillerplatz 17; building of the Institute for Oriental Studies)

Do books have passports? If they do, are they identical to those of their authors? Can books hold dual citizenship? If so, what criteria must they meet to obtain it? The emerging field of Turkish American literature raises all of these questions, and more. 

This lecture will look at Turkish American literature as writing generated in the space between two cultures, existing in a state of transit, and elusive of classic hyphenation attempts. The ambiguities of Turkish American literature are its greatest weakness and strength, as the field speaks directly to some uncomfortable conundrums in American Studies: such as urging the discipline to address the resilience of empires, revisit the “death of the author,” and negotiate who is allowed to write/speak about race, ethnicity, and migrancy, and how. 

Our discussion will start from two lesser-known early works by Elif Shafak: the articles “Life in the Islands” (2006) and “Hrant Dink’s Dream” (2007). From there, we will explore the “Turkish-Americanness” of these texts and observe the imperial entanglements they reflect. In this respect, the notion of “Ottoman Utopia” will function as a transatlantic bridge between Ottoman fictions of imperial benevolence and narratives of U.S. multiculturalism. The class also hopes to become a platform to discuss the future of Turkish American literature as a field, its challenges and openings, and what it will take for it to thrive among new generations of readers, students, and scholars.

ELENA FURLANETTO is a researcher and lecturer at the University of Duisburg-Essen and principal investigator in the DFG Research Unit “Ambiguity and Difference”. In 2023, she completed her habilitation at the University of Duisburg Essen with a project on ambiguity in the early and nineteenth-century Americas, which received the 2023 Rob Kroes Publication Prize from the European Association for American Studies. From 2021 to 2026, she co-directed the DFG research network on early American literature “Voices & Agencies: America and the Atlantic” that brought together early Americanists from Europe, the UK, and the US. Elena Furlanetto’s work moves in transnational, comparative, and postcolonial spaces, and engages the intersections between American cultures and other cultures. She has published articles and book chapters on the influences of Islamic mystic poetry on American romanticism, on Islamophobia in film and media, and more recently on Creoleness and transatlantic early American literature. She is the author of Towards Turkish American Literature: Narratives of Multiculturalism in Post-Imperial Turkey (2017).