
Our Research Center
Yönetim Kurulu

Asst. Prof. Selen Aktari-Sevgi
Director
Selen Aktari-Sevgi is an Assistant Professor at the Department of American Culture and Literature and the director of the MA program in American Culture and Literature at Başkent University. She holds a PhD in English Literature from Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey. Her recent publication is a book chapter titled “Liminality and Affective Mobility in Anne Enright’s The Green Road” in Women on the Move: Body, Memory and Femininity in Present-Day Transnational Diasporic Writing (Routledge, 2019). Her main research interests are contemporary Irish, British, and American fiction, gender studies, memory and trauma studies, and theories of affect. She is the board member of ASAT (American Studies Association of Turkey) and the editor of JAST (Journal of American Studies of Turkey).

Asst. Prof. Defne Tutan
Vice Director
Defne Ersin Tutan earned her PhD degree on British Cultural Studies from Hacettepe University. She has worked on the intersection of postmodern and postcolonial discourses, with a special interest in their impact on the representation of alternative histories. She has published a chapter, “Translation in the Service of Colonization: Brian Friel’s Translations and the Power of Language,” in the Internationalist Review of Irish Culture: Ireland in Translation (2007). She is the co-editor of The Adaptation of History: Essays on Ways of Telling the Past (McFarland, 2013), and her chapter entitled “Adaptation and History” is included in The Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies (2017). She is currently Assistant Professor at the Department of American Culture and Literature at Başkent University.

Asst. Prof. Merve Sarıkaya-Şen
Board Member
Merve Sarıkaya-Şen, PhD, is Assistant Professor at the Department of American Culture and Literature, Başkent University, Ankara, Turkey. Her research interests include transmodernity and feminism, with a particular focus on memory/trauma/diasporic works in contemporary English and American fiction. Her work has been published in The European Legacy, English Studies, European Review, Miscelánea: A Journal of English and American Studies, Gaziantep University Journal of Social Sciences, and Ankara University Journal of the Faculty of Languages and History-Geography (DTCF).

Assoc. Prof. Nil Korkut-Naykı
Board Member
Nil Korkut-Naykı is Associate Professor of Literary Studies in the Department of Foreign Language Education at Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey. She holds a PhD from the same university. Previously she worked as an Assistant Professor at the Department of American Culture and Literature at Başkent University in Ankara and as Visiting Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of English at the University of Exeter, UK. Her research interests are 20th century fiction, modernism, postmodernism, literary parody, and literary and narrative theory. She is the author of Kinds of Parody from the Medieval to the Postmodern (Peter Lang, 2009). She has also authored research articles in her interest areas published in national and international books and journals.

Asst. Prof. Sibel İzmir
Board Member
Asst. Prof. Dr. Sibel İzmir completed her B.A (1999) and M.A (2005) at Ankara University/Turkey, English Language and Literature. She received her Ph.D. degree in 2014 at Atılım University, where she has been also teaching as a Faculty Member and acting as the Vice Dean of Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Her Ph.D. dissertation is entitled “Postdramatic Tendencies on the British Stage: The Plays of Mark Ravenhill”. She has publications in national and international journals. Her research interests include contemporary British drama, Shakespeare, postdramatic theatre and theories of theatre.