Assistant Professor, Modern Greek and Comparative Literature
About
I am a comparatist of Modern Greek and Turkish literatures. Since the Compulsory Exchange of Populations signed by Greece and Turkey in 1923, institutional partitions have been carving up the Aegean—between two nation states; between two languages and alphabets; between two continents and indeed two “civilizations.” My comparative work attempts to blur, bridge, and break down these partitions by focusing on the margins of Greek- and Turkish-language literary texts: the minor and overlooked agents of textual production like editors, amanuenses, oral witnesses, readers-turned-translators or readers-turned-writers, whose fingerprints can often be detected by careful attention to the material components of the texts themselves. I use these material traces of textual emendation, reconfiguration and remixing to foreground the several forms, formats, alphabets and geographies that Greek and Turkish books sometimes crossed, even during the darkest days of nationalist partition. My case studies range from Greek-Aljamiado (Greek written in the Ottoman-Arabic script) to Karamanli Turkish (Turkish written in the Greek script), from the "highbrow" literature of C.P. Cavafy and Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar to the "lowbrow" ballads of handwritten commonplace books and reader marginalia.
My work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Journal of Modern Greek Studies, Ergon, Book History, PMLA, and elsewhere.
I would be delighted to work with graduate students interested in any facet of Greek or Turkish literature, Book History, Textual Criticism and Bibliography, Mediterranean Studies, Partitions and Border-Crossing, or Classical Reception in the modern Mediterranean.
