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Mehtap OzdemirAssistant Professor, Comparative Literature
Mehtap Ozdemir is assistant professor of comparative literature at Emory University. Prior to joining Emory, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Bologna, conducting archival research and digitization in the European Research Council-funded project, Modernizing Empires: Enlightenment, Nationalist Vanguards and Non-Western Literary Modernities, from 2021 to 2023.
Bridging Middle Eastern and European literatures, Mehtap Ozdemir’s teaching and research engage several fields in a translingual compass: global modernities, critical translation theory, comparative poetics, world literature, secularization, empire studies, and literary ethics. Her current book project explores how poiesis as creation/formation/making animates an account of cosmopolitics—an ethic of relational world-making—in the Ottoman zone of translation, advancing a critique of teleology that underwrites the link between history and modernity, beyond a religious-secular divide. She has published and forthcoming articles in Philological Encounters, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, and Comparative Literature Studies, Decolonial Reconstellations: Towards an Ethical Global Studies, and The Cambridge History of Middle Eastern Modernism.
Publications
“Ethical Antinomies: The Problem of Realism in Ottoman Literary Modernity.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 44.2 (2024): 234-248; “Translation after the Persianate? Omar Khayyam and Late Perso-Ottoman Poetic Connections.” Philological Encounters 8.2-3 (Fall 2023): 253-280; “The Late Persianate World: Transregional Connections and the Question of Language,” (introduction), co-authored and co-edited with Maryam Fatima and Alexander Jabbari. Philological Encounters 8.2-3 (Fall 2023): 111–120.
Translations:
Ziya Paşa, 1868, “Poetry and Prose,” Artichoke: Ottoman & Turkish Literature in English Translation (Boston University), available online: https://sites.bu.edu/artichoke/files/2024/08/Ziya-Pasha-Poetry-and-ProseMOzdemir.pdf
