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March - June 2025
Hande Tekdemir is an Associate Professor of English. She has worked at the Western Languages and Literatures Department of Bogazici University, Turkey between 2009-2023. Her research interests include Victorian literature, urban theory and trauma studies. She has published on Walter Benjamin, Edgar Allan Poe, Karen Tei Yamashita and Latife Tekin, along with a number of articles on nineteenth-century travelogues on Constantinople. She is currently based in Bucharest, Romania.
Critical Discussion and Historical Context for the edited volume Dracula’s Otherness in a Comparative Perspective
Utilization of the space plays an important role in Gothic literature. In this project, the notion of “otherness” will be developed particularly by focusing on the spatial and regional representations in a variety of Dracula adaptations set in the Balkans. In the English adaptations, the region appears as a borderline between Europe and the Ottoman Empire and the image of the melting pot is at the forefront. The cohabitation of different ethnic groups is presented as a chaotic experience. Hence, cosmopolitanism itself is marginalized. Indeed, the region frequently appears in the English press in the 1880s and ‘90s as a geography of political unrest with frequent rise and fall of a series of empires.
This project will focus on the depiction of the cosmopolitan composition in the Balkans as “the other”, in opposition to the “pure” national identity that is being built in English literary texts. In addition to English adaptations of Dracula, this project will also be an archival work on understudied/ noncanonical Dracula adaptations by nonwestern writers: the main focus in this part of the project will be to develop alternative claims and arguments when examining different Dracula adaptations by non-English writers, such as Romanian and Turkish writers among others.