Duygu Ergun was awarded a CompLit Academic Internship Fellowship for Winter 2022 to pursue work at the Academy of the Arts Archive in Berlin. She was responsible for the categorization, description/indexing of data, translation, and expansion of the primary sources in German and Turkish at the Aras-Ören-Archive, which is one of the two personal archives of authors from Turkey living in Germany, namely Aras Ören and Emine Sevgi Özdamar. She learned about the legal, material, and temporal limits that are involved before, during and after the collection of the archival documents. In the Aras-Ören-Archive she read, sorted, translated and entered information in Aras Ören’s correspondences with individuals and institutions such as authors, artists, newspapers, theaters publishing houses, film festivals and radio stations in Turkey as well as in Germany; in gray literature about agreements, readings, adaptations, collaborations, and in manuscripts. Duygu writes “My experience as an intern at the Academy of the Arts not only enabled me to expand and think further about my dissertation research on the everyday making of a transnational aesthetics through media networks after the post-war labor migration from Turkey to West Germany, but also to reframe and transform my methodology of archival work into a theoretical one that exists at the core of my research question”.
