tgiFHI: Mert Bahadir Reisoğlu, “The Turkish German Travel Gothic: Perilous Mobilities in the Age of European Labor Migration”

tgiFHI is a weekly series that gives Duke faculty in the humanities, interpretive social sciences and arts the opportunity to present their current research to their departmental and interdepartmental colleagues, students, and other interlocutors in their fields.

"The Turkish German Travel Gothic: Perilous Mobilities in the Age of European Labor Migration"

In my talk I revisit early narratives of mobility in Turkish German literature and contextualize them within the history of the E-Road network. Transnational authors find themselves in a position to redefine travel literature and their road narratives become a site of the gothic and the grotesque, giving rise to ghosts that haunt the guest worker. In revealing the ghosts and wars embedded in technologies of transportation, their works conceptualize the very notion of transmission as a process that is always open to ruptures and accidents.

Mert Bahadir Reisoglu is an assistant professor in German Studies. Before coming to Duke, he was an assistant professor in Comparative Literature at Koç University, Istanbul. His research interests are Turkish German Studies, media theory and intellectual history. He published articles on Friedrich Kittler, Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Güney Dal and Orhan Pamuk among others.

tgiFHI events take place from 9:30-11:00 a.m. on Friday mornings in the Ahmadieh Family Lecture Hall (C105, Bay 4, Smith Warehouse) with breakfast served beforehand.

RSVP at https://duke.is/c/4ptw