Location BIAA, Atatürk Bulvarı 154/1 and online
Date and time
Tuesday 1 October 2024
18:00 - 20:00 (London BST)
20:00 - 22:00 (Ankara UTC+3)
Speakers
Şima İmşir
Health, Literature and Women in Twentieth-Century Turkey offers readers fresh insight into Turkish modernity and its discourse on health, what it excludes and how these potentialities manifest themselves in women’s fiction to shape the imagination of the period. Starting from the nineteenth century, health gradually became a focal topic in relation to the future of the empire, and later the Republic. Examining representations of health and illness in nationalist romances, melodramas and modernist works, this book will explore diseases such as syphilis, tuberculosis and cancer, and their representation in the literary imagination as a tool to discuss anxieties over cultural transformation. This book places Turkish literature in the field of health humanities and identifies the discourse on health as a key component in the making of the Turkish nation-building ideology. By focusing on the place of health and illness in canonical and non-canonised fiction, it opens a new field in Turkish literary studies.
Şima İmşir is an assistant professor in Comparative Literature at Koç University. Her teaching and research range from medical and health humanities, illness and literature to literature and technology, modernism and its legacies in contemporary fiction. She was awarded a School of Arts, Languages and Cultures Scholarship (2013-2016) to complete her PhD at Manchester University from where she received her degree. Her articles have appeared and are forthcoming in numerous edited collections and in journals such as Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Journal of Research in Gender Studies, A History of Middle Eastern Modernism (Cambridge University Press), Turkish Literature as World Literature (Bloomsbury), Women of the Middle East (Routledge) and Monsters in Society (Brill).