Hande Gurses

Visiting Scholar (Fall 2018)

Hande Gurses holds a PhD in Literary Studies from University College London. She was previously Visiting Lecturer in the Comparative Literature Program at UMass Amherst, where she taught courses on international short story, dystopian literatures, and ecocriticism. Her primary research interests include contemporary world literature, cosmopolitanism, ecocriticism, and critical animal studies. She is also interested in inclusive pedagogies and contemplative practices in higher education. At UMass Amherst she was the recipient of TIDE fellowship (Teaching for Inclusiveness, Diversity, and Equity) and an active member of the Contemplative Pedagogy Working Group.

She has published her work on Orhan Pamuk in Fear and Fantasy in a Global World (Brill/Rodopi 2015), Global Perspectives on Orhan Pamuk (Palgrave 2012) and other academic and non-academic journals. She is working on a monograph titled Poetics and Politics of the Bridge: Displacing Identities in Orhan Pamuk, which offers a thematic analysis of Pamuk’s oeuvre through the broader framework of world literature. Most recently she co-edited a volume on ecocritical approaches to contemporary Turkish literature titled Animals, Plants, and Landscapes: An Ecology of Turkish Literature and Film (forthcoming from Routledge Press). Her current book project examines the relation animals and sovereignty in the construction of national identity.