Assistant Professor, German Studies
About
Kristin Dickinson is an Assistant Professor of German Studies at the University of Michigan. Her research on the intersections of German and (Ottoman) Turkish literature examines the potential of translation, as both a formal and a social medium, to intervene in nationalist ideologies and nationally structured areas of study. Her teaching and publications have focused on questions of world literature, multilingualism and cross-linguistic remembrance, nationalism and the history of language reform, and non-ethnic modes of belonging. She has held fellowships with the Social Science Research Council and the International Research Center for Cultural Studies (IFK) in Vienna. She is the recipient of the Charles Bernheimer Prize from the American Comparative Literature Association, and her articles and translations have appeared in New German Critique, Transit, Turkish-German Studies Yearbook, and Europe Now.
Her forthcoming book, DisOrientations: German-Turkish Cultural Contact in translation (1811-1946), examines literary translations as a complex mode of cultural, political, and linguistic orientation. Through a unique multilingual archive, it reveals the omnidirectional and transtemporal movements of translations, which harbor the productively disorienting potential to reconfigure the relationships of “original” to “translation,” “past” to “present,” “West” to “East,” and “German” to “Turkish.”
