William Coker received his PhD in Comparative Literature from Yale University in 2010 with the dissertation, Romantic Exteriority: The Construction of Literature in Rousseau, Jean Paul Richter, and Percy Shelley. His scholarship examines Romanticism as the inaugural phase of the European Enlightenment’s self-critique.
In such journals as Comparative Literature and Eighteenth-Century Fiction, and in a number of forthcoming edited volumes, he has published articles and chapters on several of the era’s major figures: Rousseau, Jean Paul, Keats and Hegel, and examined the reception of William Blake in Turkish literature and culture. Having chaired the organizing committee for an international conference on “Alternative Enlightenments” in 2013, he is currently at work on a book project on narrative authority in the Romantic-era novel.
In his nine years at Bilkent, he has extensively explored greater Ankara and competed in the Turkish Masters Swimming League.