3. Board Member - Cultural Studies/Germanistik

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.

Chunjie Zhang (Ph.D., Duke, 2010) is Associate Professor of German at the University of California, Davis. She works on the long eighteenth century, global modernisms, Asian-German studies, contemporary refugee literature, and postcolonialism. Her scholarship and teaching endeavor to explore transcultural perspectives in German literature and culture. She is on the program committee for the American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies 2021. Her first book Transculturality and German Discourse in the Age of European Colonialism (Northwestern UP 2017) situates German literature and philosophy in the polycentric global eighteenth century and delineates the contour of a transcultural discourse. Moving beyond the question of empire or enlightenment, her book reads travel writing, literature, and philosophy to shift ground from predominantly critiquing Eurocentrism toward diligently detecting global connections and enhancing the visibility of non-European contributions in global modernity. Actively engaging in Asian German studies, Chunjie edited the scholarly forum on “Asian German Studies” with German Quarterly (93.1, Winter 2020). The contributors discuss the state of this emerging interdisciplinary field and reviews themes such as Chinese-German, Japanese-German, Indian-German, Vietnamese-German connections related to exile studies, Turkish-German studies, global German studies, and transpacific German studies. Chunjie also initiated and co-edits a new book series “Asia, Europe, and Global Connections” (Routledge). Her edited book Composing Modernist Connections in China and Europe (Routledge, 2019) stresses modernist connections beyond the bifurcation between East and West. She also co-edited the issue “Goethe, Worlds, and Literatures” (Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies, 2018) that shows the different constructions of Goethe as a classical writer for the concept of world literature in various historical and cultural contexts. Among her articles, she recently wrote about the refugee crisis as well as social distancing and the aesthetics of touch. Her recent research has been supported by the Humboldt Foundation, the DAAD, and the University of California.