Arabic, Islamic, & Middle Eastern Studies, Film & Media Studies
I completed my PhD in Comparative Literature at the University of Oregon where I received a certificate degree in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and specialized in film studies. My research and teaching focus on global cinema and comparative media studies, cutting across melodrama, queer theory, and Islam and secularism. I am currently working on my book project that proposesarabeskas an affective cultural formation around a sense of victimhood rooted in an Islamic discourse across media. In a genealogy, I historicize both the formation of the aesthetic regime of melodrama andarabesk'schallenges to the kinship between melodrama and secular modernity in republican Turkey.My second research project takes up the recent global allure of Turkish televisual melodrama and maps its divergent geopolitical itineraries across the global South.
