Ela Gezen

Candidate statement

Ela Gezen (Ph.D., University of Michigan, 2012) is Associate Professor of German at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her research and teaching focus on twentieth-century German and Turkish literature and culture, with emphases on literatures of migration, theater, minority discourses, historical and theoretical accounts of transnationalism, and literary and cultural theory. She is the author of Brecht, Turkish Theater, and Turkish-German Literature: Reception, Adaptation, and Innovation after 1960 (Camden House, 2018) and co-editor of two special issues, Colloquia Germanica (“Transnational Hi/Stories: Turkish-German Texts and Contexts,” 2014) and the Jahrbuch Türkisch-deutsche Studien (“Turkish-German Studies: Past, Present, and Future,” 2015). In addition, she has published articles on music, theater and literature, focusing on the intersection between aesthetics and politics in both Turkish and German contexts. These have appeared in Gegenwartsliteratur: Ein germanistisches Jahrbuch, the German Studies Review, Comparative Drama, Literature Compass, and undercurrents: Forum für linke Literaturwissenschaft, among other venues. Currently, she is working on her second book, Cultures in Migration: Turkish Artistic Practices and Cultural-Political Interventions in West Berlin, 1970–1980, is editing a special issue on Aras Ören (forthcoming with Monatshefte), and she is co-editor of Minorities and Minority Discourses (under review for Berghahn Books’ Spektrum series), an edited volume based on the 2017 conference she co-organized with Jonathan Skolnik and Priscilla Layne. She has attended every GSA conference since her very first in 2008, and in addition to presenting papers, has collaborated with colleagues on organizing seminars (Turkish German Studies, (Post)Migrant Theater, Non-Citizenship and Artistic Practice), panel series (Literature and Refuge, Turkish-German Texts and Contexts, Minorities and Minority Discourse) and roundtables (Theorizing Refugees). Besides serving on the GSA’s Program and Arts Night committees, she is on the editorial board of the Brecht Yearbook, and chapter vice president of the AATG MA chapter.