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March - June 2025
October 2025 - January 2026
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.
Contemporary Gothic in a Comparative Perspective: Conversation across genres, historical periods and national literatures
Early Gothic studies worked with the claim that Gothic literature originated in Europe, particularly in England during the second half of 18th century. In the works of leading scholars of the field such as David Punter (The Literature of Terror, 1980; Blackwell Companion to the Gothic, 2001; A New Companion to the Gothic, 2012), Jerold Hogle (ed. The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, 2002) and Dale Townshend, Roger Luckhurst, Catherine Spooner, it is claimed that Gothic fiction emerged as a reaction to Enlightenment philosophy. Their research has been developed mainly through a Eurocentric perspective. While this genealogy is still recognized in Gothic scholarship, it is also taken to task because of the unquestioned Eurocentric assumptions. While recent scholarship has underlined the importance of inclusion of non-western texts, there is still a gap in the scholarship regarding the significance of comparative perspectives.
This project aims to bring together scholars who work with a comparative methodology to focus on contemporary issues and texts of Gothic literature. The project goals are to work on an edited collection, hold workshops and other relevant activities.
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.