Category Archives: Past events

 Date: April 25, 2017

Speaker: Mihaela P. Harper
Academic Affiliation: CCI, Bilkent University
Title: Georgi Gospodinov’s There, Where We Are Not: Beyond, Between, Elsewhere, and Nowhere

Description: After his last novel, The Physics of Sorrow, prompted Jean-Luc Nancy to urge everyone to read it “sans délai,” a much-anticipated volume of poetry by Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov appeared in print in April 2016. He writes “In Place of a Preface” that this is a book “Not about the cities, but about the absence /…/ Not geography, but beyond / a geography of the beyond. / Of this here of the bodies and there of language.” Gathered over the course of a decade, Gospodinov’s poetic peregrinations traverse boundaries— geographical (between local and global), temporal (between past and present), philosophical (between events and non-events), and linguistic (between the trivial and the profound). The poems sustain his endeavors to glimpse “elsewhere” in its many senses and the human being with all of its doubts, sorrows, [and] afternoon lonelinesses.

Date: March 28, 2017   

Speaker: Daniel Irizarry
Academic Affiliation: Department of Performing Arts, Bilkent University
Title: Kuden and Mask Work

Description: From ancient Greek theatre to Meyerhold’s etudes & biomechanics to my grandma: how mask and tempo have helped shape my training with actors.

Date: March 14, 2017

Speaker: Heather H. Yeung
Academic Affiliation: ELIT, Bilkent University
Title: To Catch a Worm: From the Early Bird to the Diet of Worms

Description: In this CCI colloquium talk, based on research for her forthcoming cultural history of the worm, Dr. Heather H. Yeung (ELIT) invites you to come along and, like the early bird, attempt to catch a worm! Analysing the proverbial ‘early bird’ and other well-known worm-eaten phrases, the talk will explore a series of very different habits of the worm, from the Kinabalu Giant Earthworm to the Carthusian Miscellany (BL MS Additional 37049); from the balololailai festival to Wallace Stevens’s worm-eaten Badroulbadour… Combining literary texts with cultural and scientific knowledge, the talk is broadly concerned with the manners in which we digest, process, and classify this creature, and seeks to provoke a reconsideration of what it is we react to when we encounter, in one of its many guises, the worm.

Unwritten History or Unwriting History: On Armenians, Greeks and Jews in Turkish Literature

The contributions made by non-Muslim authors to Ottoman Turkish literature have largely been ignored by mainstream literary historians and critics. This papers aims to present Armeno-Turkish, Judeo-Turkish and Karamanli literatures and to explore the challenges it represents for Turkish literary historiography and criticism.
Date: 23 November 2010
Speaker: Dr. Laurent Mignon, Bilkent University, Department of Turkish Literature

The Irony of American Tragedy

We have heard, often, that in America, a country in which a belief in betterment, optimism and individual triumph reign supreme (at least, this is the narrative), tragedy is not possible. Most often, though, the criteria for tragic status stems from a single work of philosophy: Aristotle’s Poetics, rather than from attentive consideration of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides’ wildly divergent tragedies. I will argue that we have seen, in this last decade, an upswing in American tragedies rooted in, “the irony of American history,” (to borrow Reinhold Niebuhr’s famous title) and in the media of episodic television and film. To understand this upswing, though, we need to look carefully at the individual Athenian tragedies themselves.
Date: 9 November 2010
Speaker: Dr. Christopher Love, Bilkent University, Program in Cultures, Civilizations & Ideas

Family Worship for Dummies: Defoe’s Trusted Brand, the FamilyInstructor Conduct Books

The Crusoe sequels, The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe(1719) and Serious Reflections on the life of Robinson Crusoe(1720), receive little critical attention, a neglect attributed to the increasing formal disparity between the later novels and Robinson Crusoe (1719). Reading Defoe’s Family Instructor series of conduct books (The Family Instructor [1715], The Family Instructor II [1718] and A New Family Instructor [1727]) alongside the Robinson Crusoe series reveals a larger scheme at work. Defoe reuses titles and characters to create unlikely partnerships between texts in order to bring a general readership to theologically sophisticated work. These formal disparities do not signal artistic lapses; they represent Defoe’s attempt to use earlier texts as brand-like entities.
Date: 26 October 2010
Speaker: Dr. Margaret France, Bilkent University, Program in Cultures, Civilizations & Ideas

Theodore Roosevelt and New York: The Future President’s Urban Roots 

Theodore Roosevelt has become an icon of the American West, frequently portrayed in history as a cowboy, hunter, and cattle rancher.  This image obscures the fact that Roosevelt was born and raised in New York City, the most throughly urbanized part of the United States.  Moreover, he made his early political career in New York, serving in the state assembly, running for mayor, and serving as police commissioner.  While many Roosevelt biographers seek to place Roosevelt and his future policies in a western context, it is really New York City that shaped his ideas about America and launched his political career.
Date: 19 October 2010
Speaker: Dr. Edward Kohn, Bilkent University Department of History, Chairman of Department of American Culture and Literature.

A talk presented by Prof. Olivier Abel, of The Protestant Institute of Theology, Paris.

Abstract:
There are certain things that cannot be forced. We cannot make someone believe any more than we can make them remember, make them love any more than we can make them forgive and forget. The danger facing every politics of memory is to declare a duty of remembering, if not of forgetting, and to build on that an official version of history.

To clarify the relationship between memory and history, without confusing them or dissociating them completely, we must turn to Paul Ricœur, whose work best guides us in this area. To untangle the two notions history and memory, he introduces a third, that of politics. Behind the conflict of memory and history there lies a horizon irreducible to that of the epistemological truth of history, namely that of the divided city. How to ensure that this difference does not lead to civil war? How do we ensure a minimum of historical confidence so that history is not reduced to a relationship of force? This necessary confidence presupposes credit given to a diversity of memories, and to a historical distance. It also supposes that today’s memory, when it reappropriates the past and makes it its own, does not do so as a revindication of identity, but rather through work and an ethical displacement that encompasses the past in its entirety. Finally this confidence requires that a difference be made between that part of the past that does not pass and is not finished, and what is past and can be buried. All these are questions where philosophy meets history.

To conclude I wish to address a philosophical question of some concern to me: the passage from a regime of imperial history (that of the Ottoman Empire), to a regime of national history (that of Kemalist Turkey), did not happen overnight. Similarly what we seek in Europe, and indeed the world, is the delicate passage from a regime of national history to a post-national, federal or pluri-national regime, that we do not know yet and which we must invent. This passage is a dangerous moment. How do we make place for a new regime of memory, which must also be a new regime for political agreement and disagreement. Is it not in this difficult remembering and reopening of the past to other historical possibilities that we are caught and at which we must work together?

Dr. Rachel Jones, Dept. of Philosophy, Dundee University:  “Time, Natality, and the Self: the relational ontologies of Cavarero and Battersby”; June 2^nd, 2004

 

Dr. Rachel  Bowlby, Department of English, University of York:  “Fifty-fifty: Freud, Female Subjectivity and the Danaids”; May 10^th, 2004

 

Dr. Robin Ostle, Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford: “Excellence in Modern Arabic Literature”; April 15^th, 2004

 

Dr. Barry Stocker, Department of Philosophy, Yeditepe University: “Philosophy of Literary Form: Lukács and Benjamin”; April 1^st, 2004

 

Dr. Richard Bourke, Department of History, Queen Mary College, University of London: “Sociability and Antagonism in Enlightenment Political Thought”; March 25^th, 2004

 

Devrim Kiliçer, Ankara University: “9/11: New York City as Wasteland”; March 5^th, 2004

 

Dr. Banu Helvacıoğlu, Bilkent University Department of Political Science: “The Turning Point in History from the Point of View of Rescue Dogs”; March 5^th, 2004

 

Dr. Şerif Mardin, Sabancı University: “Turkish Exceptionalism”; March 5^th, 2004

 

Dr. Mustafa Nakeeb, CCI Program, Bilkent University: “Anachronism and History in Plato’s Gorgias: On the philosophical timelessness and historical timeliness of the Platonic dialogue”; March 5^th, 2004

 

Dr. Laurent Mignon, Dept. of Turkish Literature, Bilkent University: “History Beyond Prose and Poetry:  Ali Kemal and the Ottoman historiographical tradition”; March 5^th, 2004

 

Fatih Bayram, Dept. of History, Bilkent University: “Perception of Alexander the Great in the Ottoman Empire”; March 5^th, 2004

 

Dr. Yusuf Eradam, Dept. of American Culture and Literature, Ankara University: “Nylon Rupture Zone: The repository of notices for continuity to stand mortality”; March 6^th, 2004

 

Dr. Dennis Bryson, Dept. of American Culture and Literature, Bilkent University:  “John Dewey and the Eclipse of the Public”; March 6^th, 2004

 

Dr. Duncan Chesney, CCI Program, Bilkent University: “Proust and Persistence”; March 6^th, 2004

 

Fulya Ertem, Dept. of Graphic Design, Bilkent University: “The Pose in Early Photography: Questioning the attempts of appropriating the past”; March 6^th, 2004

 

Dilek Kaya Mutlu, Dept. of Graphic Design, Bilkent University: “(Re)constructing Ayastefanos: The origination of Turkish cinema”; March 6^th, 2004

 

Dr. Trevor Hope, CCI Program, Bilkent University: “Mummies in the Archive: or, The National Imaginary Unwrapped”; March 6^th, 2004

 

Dr. Meltem Ahıska, Dept. of Sociology, Boğaziçi University: “Occidentalism and Registers of Truth: Politics of Archives in Turkey”; March 6^th, 2004

 

Dr. Thomas Zimmerman, Dept. of Archaeology, Bilkent University: “Time and the Phenomenon of Timekeeping Amongst Prehistoric and Early Historical Societies”; March 6^th, 2004

 

Plamena Tsoneva, Varna Summer International Music Festival: “Festivals between Past and Modernity”;  March 6^th, 2004

 

Dr. Anthony Lake, Dept. of English Language and Literature, Bilkent University: “Looking at Girls: Aesthetics and ethics in E.M. Forster’s Italian novels”; February 24^th, 2004

 

Dr. Nicola Liscutin, School of Languages, Linguistics, and Culture, Birkeck College, University of London: “Forever After? Madame Butterfly and its Western and Japanese legacies”; February 12^th, 2004

 

Dr. Sabry Hafez, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London: “Occidentalism: Arab perceptions of the West”; February 11^th, 2004

 

Dr. Don Randall, Dept. of English Language and Literature, Bilkent University: “Some Further Being: Postcoloniality and alterity in David Malouf’s fiction”; December 23^rd, 2003

 

Dr. Andrea Rehberg, CCI Program, Bilkent University: “Towards a Life of Alterity”; December 10^th, 2003

 

Dr. Duncan Chesney, CCI Program, Bilkent University: “Proust and Film, or Visconti’s Search”; October 14^th, 2003

 

Dr. Trevor Hope, CCI Program, Bilkent University: “The Nation that Could Not Swallow: Dis-incorporated polities, unremembered alterities”; October 2^nd, 2003

 

Dr. Murat Karamuftuoğlu, Dept. of Communication and Design, Bilkent University: “How Relevant is Critical Theory for Understanding Information Systems?”; April 24^th, 2003

 

Dr. Zafer Aracagök, Dept. of Graphic Design, Bilkent University: “On Rhythm, Resonance and Distortion”; April 8^th, 2003

 

Dr. Lewis Johnson, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Sabancı University: “Re. locating vision: The art of Jenny Holzer and Hans Haacke”; March 27^th, 2003

 

Dr. Jennifer Terni, CCI Program, Bilkent University: “Fashion: the fabric of a new social economy (Paris 1820-1848)”; March 11^th, 2003

 

Drs. Zuhal Ulusoy and Asuman Türkün-Erendil, Dept. of Landscape Architecture and Urban Design, Bilkent University: “Ankara Citidel: encounter of the modernity project with the historical context”; February 21^st, 2003

 

Şeyda Başlı, Dept. of Turkish Literature, Bilkent University: “Akabi Hikayisi and Felatun Bey ve Rakım Efendi: A comparative approach to the Ottoman modernization process”; February 21^st, 2003

 

Dr. Laurent Mignon, Dept. of Turkish Literature, Bilkent University: “Lost Voices: Religious minorities and the lost canon”; February 21^st, 2003

 

Dr. Mahmut Mutman, Department of Communication and Design, Bilkent University: “Re-writinh: The Canon and the Other”; February 21^st, 2003

 

Dr. Asuman Suner, Department of Communication and Design, Bilkent University: “Home is Where the Heart Isn’t: (Dis)placing Turkish film studies”; February 21^st, 2003

 

Çağlar Enneli, Ankara University: “Watching Television and Consuming Messages: Social anthropological study of the identity conflicts in the case of a television program, Turkish Big Brother”; Febrary 21, 2003

 

Mustafa Şahiner and Sinan Akıllı, Hacettepe University: “Redrawing the Boundaries of Native Cultural Territory through Border-Crossings in Classroom”; February 22, 2003

 

Dr. Don Randall, Dept. of English Language and Literature, Bilkent University: “David Malouf’s Australia: Placing and displacing subjectivity and nationhood”; February 22, 2003

 

Dr. Lawrence Raw, Department of British Language and Culture, Başkent University: “Turkish Departments of Foreign Literature and/or Cultures: What Now?”; February 22, 2003

 

Dr. Meyda Yeğenoğlu, Dept. of Sociology, Middle East Technical University: “Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism in a Globalized World”; February 22, 2003

 

Dr. Halil Nalçaoğlu, Faculty of Communication, Ankara University: “Apocalyptic Dreams of Modernity: Time Capsules”; February 22, 2003

 

Mustafa Gürbüz, Bilkent University: “Constructing a “Conversational Encounter” in a Globalized World”; February 22, 2003

 

Dr. Trevor Hope, CCI Program, Bilkent University: “Antigone: More (or less) than kinship, less (or more) than kind”; February 22, 2003

 

Dr. Phillipe Rosenberg, Dept. of History, Emory University: “A ‘Pythagorean’ in the seventeenth century: Thomas Tryon’s attack on slavery”; December 19^th, 2002

 

Dr. C. Louise Barry, CCI Program, Bilkent University: “Versailles and the Production of Social Space”; November 12^th, 2002

 

Dr. Geoff Bowe, CCI Program, Bilkent University: “The Platonic Metaphysical Heirarchy”; October 3^rd, 2002

 

Dr. Sita Schutt, Dept. of English Literature, Bilkent University: “’Close-up from a distance’: London and Englishness in Ford Maddox Ford, Conan Doyle and Bram Stoker”; October 15^th, 2002

 

Dr. Trevor Hope, CCI Program, Bilkent University: “Modernity’s Pockets: The Perverse polities of Radclyffe Hall”; May 16^th, 2002

 

Dr. Ralph Shain, Stanford University: “Situating Derrida Between Kierkegaard and Hegel”; March 5^th, 2002

 

Dr. Costantino Costantini, CCI Program, Bilkent University: “Waiting for Nothing: On Kant’s Laughter”; March 28^th, 2002

 

Dr. Dror Abend-David, CCI Program, Bilkent University: “Shylock’s Mother- the translation of a silent film”; February 5^th, 2002

 

Dr. Mustafa Nakeeb, CCI Program, Bilkent University: “Hellenistic Historiography and the Appropriation of Platonic Philosophy”; December 5^th, 2001

 

Dr. Matthew Gumpert, CCI Program, Bilkent University: “Urban Bar as Sacred Precinct”; November 5^th, 2001

 

 

Unwritten History or Unwriting History: On Armenians, Greeks and Jews in Turkish Literature

The contributions made by non-Muslim authors to Ottoman Turkish literature have largely been ignored by mainstream literary historians and critics. This papers aims to present Armeno-Turkish, Judeo-Turkish and Karamanli literatures and to explore the challenges it represents for Turkish literary historiography and criticism.
Date: 23 November 2010
Speaker: Dr. Laurent Mignon, Bilkent University, Department of Turkish Literature

The Irony of American Tragedy

We have heard, often, that in America, a country in which a belief in betterment, optimism and individual triumph reign supreme (at least, this is the narrative), tragedy is not possible. Most often, though, the criteria for tragic status stems from a single work of philosophy: Aristotle’s Poetics, rather than from attentive consideration of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides’ wildly divergent tragedies. I will argue that we have seen, in this last decade, an upswing in American tragedies rooted in, “the irony of American history,” (to borrow Reinhold Niebuhr’s famous title) and in the media of episodic television and film. To understand this upswing, though, we need to look carefully at the individual Athenian tragedies themselves.
Date: 9 November 2010
Speaker: Dr. Christopher Love, Bilkent University, Program in Cultures, Civilizations & Ideas

Family Worship for Dummies: Defoe’s Trusted Brand, the FamilyInstructor Conduct Books

The Crusoe sequels, The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe(1719) and Serious Reflections on the life of Robinson Crusoe(1720), receive little critical attention, a neglect attributed to the increasing formal disparity between the later novels and Robinson Crusoe (1719). Reading Defoe’s Family Instructor series of conduct books (The Family Instructor [1715], The Family Instructor II [1718] and A New Family Instructor [1727]) alongside the Robinson Crusoe series reveals a larger scheme at work. Defoe reuses titles and characters to create unlikely partnerships between texts in order to bring a general readership to theologically sophisticated work. These formal disparities do not signal artistic lapses; they represent Defoe’s attempt to use earlier texts as brand-like entities.
Date: 26 October 2010
Speaker: Dr. Margaret France, Bilkent University, Program in Cultures, Civilizations & Ideas

Theodore Roosevelt and New York: The Future President’s Urban Roots 

Theodore Roosevelt has become an icon of the American West, frequently portrayed in history as a cowboy, hunter, and cattle rancher.  This image obscures the fact that Roosevelt was born and raised in New York City, the most throughly urbanized part of the United States.  Moreover, he made his early political career in New York, serving in the state assembly, running for mayor, and serving as police commissioner.  While many Roosevelt biographers seek to place Roosevelt and his future policies in a western context, it is really New York City that shaped his ideas about America and launched his political career.
Date: 19 October 2010
Speaker: Dr. Edward Kohn, Bilkent University Department of History, Chairman of Department of American Culture and Literature.

The Allure of the Undead: Jan Potocki’s Manuscript Found in Saragossa

This paper considers Jan Potocki’s Manuscript Found in Saragossa in light of its intervention into 19th century struggles between the romantic and the novelistic. Potocki’s text illuminates the links between debates about genre and discourses of civilization and savagery, highlighting the ambiguous role of reading in the formation of the ‘civilized’ modern subject.

Considered by Tzvetan Todorov to be an emblematic example of the fantastic, The Manuscript Found in Saragossa details the adventures of a young soldier named Alfons van Worden as he travels through the Sierra Morena, the mountain range that borders La Mancha. This proximity to the setting of Don Quixote is not coincidental; indeed, the novel engages with many of the questions raised by Cervantes’ famous work, particularly that of the relationship between literature and reality, and the question of whether fiction is an art of moral instruction or of dangerous illusions.

As Alfons’ trek continues, he becomes caught up in a web of what appear to be supernatural machinations, haunted by ghosts and demons and tempted with illicit pleasures. Simultaneously, he is joined by a band of travelers who pass the time by telling stories, many of which are related to the otherworldly occurrences that he struggles to rationalize. The action of the novel shifts from encounters with a foreign world to encounters with exotic tales, becoming a quest of interpretation that blurs the lines between fiction and experience.
Date: 14 December 2011
Speaker: Dr. Katarzyna (Kasia) Bartoszyńska, Bilkent University, Program in Cultures, Civilizations & Ideas

Spring Program

“The Barbaric Reader: Revolution and Secrecy in Bolaño’s Distant Star“

This paper analyzes Bolaño’s 1996 novel Distant Star, and specifically the novel’s narrator, a voracious reader who desires nothing more than to be a revolutionary. Though his political activities seem doomed to failure, I argue that the novel puts forth a concept of “permanent revolution” in the narrator’s betrayals of the texts he reads so closely, even though — indeed, because — he himself is unaware of these betrayals.

Date: Thursday, 18 October 2012 from 16.45 to 17.45 in the G-160 Seminar Room.
Presenter: Dr. Cory Stockwell
View entire 2012 CCI Colloquium Series

Utopian Impulses

Dr. Kory Sorrell, Bilkent University, Fall 2012
Interested students must contact Dr. Sorrell before registration.

The word “Utopia”, coined by Sir Thomas More, is a pun that refers both to “nowhere” (ou topos) and to a “happy place” (eutopos). It is in practice an imaginative projection, rooted in some time and place, of a possible future that not only carries forward the best parts of the present, but also frees us from pressing injustice, arbitrary constraint, and other sources of perceived suffering. Responding to diverse conditions, Utopian constructions vary in form, but all imagine a better way of life, and many struggle to find the means to somehow implement these visions in the here and now. “Progress”, as Oscar Wilde writes, “is the realization of Utopias”. In this seminar, we carefully examine the Utopian Impulse, its various manifestations, its historical successes and failures, and its realistic prospects for the future we will someday share. To fully appreciate and evaluate the influence of Utopian thought and practice, this seminar requires (a) close reading of literary, philosophical, and historical texts, (b) consideration of Utopian ideas in art and architecture, and (c) examination of potentially new resources for Utopian projects resulting from recent advances in the social sciences. During the seminar and in research projects, students will analytically engage these sources, provide their own deeply informed syntheses, and evaluate the relevance of the Utopian Impulse.

Medieval Germanic Epic and Saga

Dr. Denis Ferhatovic, Bilkent University, Spring 2012
Interested students must contact Dr. Ferhatovic before registration.

Thanks to popular cinematic modernizations, we are all now familiar with mighty, stoic men and women who face adversity that assumes the form of a cannibalistic monster, winged dragon, or rival tribe leader, with a firm grasp on their weapon and a brutal sense of humor.  But is there more to this type of heroism than meets the eye?  We will read about different Germanic heroes from three overlapping but distinct traditions (Anglo-Saxon, Old Norse, and Middle High German), their allies and adversaries, their spectacular accomplishments and sometimes equally spectacular failures.  We will ponder such issues as military strategies, gender dynamics, portrayal of enemies, return of the repressed past, ambivalence of heroism, and afterlife of these texts in film, video-games, and comic books.

Texts:  *Beowulf* and some shorter Old English poems, *Grettir’s Saga*, *Njal’s Saga*, *The Saga of the Volsungs*, *The Nibelungenlied.*

Films:  “Beowulf and Grendel”(dir. Gunnarsson, 2005); “Beowulf” (dir. Zemeckis, 2007);  “The 13th Warrior” (dir. McTiernan, 1999); “Thor” (dir. Brannagh, 2011); “How to Train Your Dragon” (dir. DeBlois and Sanders, 2010).

“Romancing the Exotic: L’Esclave blanche (1939) and Cultural Miscegenation”

French fiction cinema of the 1930s built an intricate exotic imaginary that encompasses stories, relationships, and politics that often break away from patterns established in films more strictly defined as “colonial.” The 1939 film L’Esclave blanche [The White Slave Woman] offers a particularly intriguing example of this non-colonial exoticism. Set in Istanbul during the waning years of the Ottoman Empire, the film represents intercultural romance in ways that were unseen in contemporary colonial narratives. Part comedy, part commentary, L’Esclave blanche demonstrates that the exoticist impulse was not confined to representations of empire, but it also shows that even outside the colonies, the West maintained the upper hand.

Date: 10 April 2012 from 13.30-15.30 in the G-160 Seminar Room.
Presenter: Dr. Colleen Kennedy-Karpat is an instructor in the Department of Communication and Design at Bilkent University. Her book manuscript, Rogues, Romance, and Race: Exoticism in French Fiction Cinema, 1930-1939 recently won the Northeast Modern Language Association Book Award.
View a video of L’Esclave blanche.

The Posters of Other Talks

•  “Dystopia in the Background: Terror and Camp in Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men” 

CCI CS – 20 December 2012 – Dr. İpek Çelik

•  “Herbert Spencer, Gerard Hopkins, and Victorian Lyric”

CCI CS – 26 November 2012 – Dr. Michael Meeuwis 

• “Belated Mythography in Keats and Hegel” 

CCI CS – 8 November 2012 – Dr. William Coker

•  Defacing Statues: The Erasure of the Anthropomorphic in Charles de Brosses and Diderot

CCI CS – 13 March 2012 – Dr. Daniel Leonard

•  HUM 332: APOCALYPSE NOW

CCI CS – 6 February 2012 – Dr. Chris Love

Taking McLuhan Seriously