Location BIAA, Atatürk Bulvarı 154/1 and online
Date and time
Thursday 13 November 2025
14:30 - 16:30 (London GMT)
17:30 - 19:30 (Ankara UTC+3)
Speakers
C. Ceyhun Arslan
Koç University
This talk provides an overview of Dr. Arslan’s first monograph, The Ottoman Canon and the Construction of Arabic and Turkish Literatures. The book fleshes out the Ottoman canon’s multilingual character to call for a literary history that can reassess and even move beyond categories that many critics take for granted, such as ‘classical Arabic literature’ and ‘Ottoman literature’. It gives a historically contextualized close reading of works from authors who have been studied as pioneers of Arabic and Turkish literatures, such as Ziya Pasha (1829-1880), Jurjī Zaydān (1861-1914), and Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar (1901-1962). The Ottoman Canon analyzes how these authors prepared the arguments and concepts that shape how we study Arabic and Turkish literatures today.
To register to attend in-person, click here
To register to attend on Zoom, click here
C. Ceyhun Arslan is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Koç University. His first monograph, The Ottoman Canon and the Construction of Arabic and Turkish Literatures, appeared in the Edinburgh Studies on the Ottoman Empire series. His second book project, Thinking with Worlds: Literatures alongside the Mediterranean, is under review for a world literature series of another university press. Dr. Arslan is also the co-editor-in-chief of Middle Eastern Literatures and has received fellowship awards from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the European Commission, and the Science Academy. His work has appeared in top journals and edited volumes across various fields, including Comparative Literature Studies, The Routledge Handbook of Arabic Poetry, and Middle Eastern Literatures.