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I am an Assistant Professor of Humanities at Bilkent University (Ankara, Türkiye), where I teach in the Program in Cultures, Civilizations and Ideas. I earned my PhD in English & American Literature at Washington University in St. Louis. I specialize in nineteenth-century American and transatlantic literature, literature and science, and the environmental humanities.
I am the incoming President-Elect for the Ralph Waldo Emerson Society (beginning 2026), and I also serve as Associate Editor for The Concord Saunterer: A Journal of Thoreau Studies.
Book Project
My current book project, Aphoristic Science: Ecology, Psychology, and Nineteenth-Century American Literature, argues that a speculative style of writing—which I identify with the open-ended aphorism—undergirds the emergence of new scientific inquiry in the nineteenth century. I trace this style in chapters on Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Emily Dickinson, William James, and W.E.B. Du Bois. More information is available here.
Recent Writing
My essay, “Anesthetic Reading: Ether, Nitrous Oxide, and Nineteenth-Century Interpretation,” was awarded the 2025 Ralph Cohen Prize and will appear in an upcoming issue of New Literary History.
“‘Two Stories Tangled Together’: The Double Brain, Pudd’nhead Wilson, and Those Extraordinary Twins,” Nineteenth-Century Literature (2025).
“A Thoreauvian at Quarry Farm,” Quarry Farm Testimonial, Center for Mark Twain Studies (August 2025).
Upcoming Events
December 12–13, 2025 (Paris, France): At the British Association of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, I will present the paper “Creative Reading as Translational Reading: Teaching Emerson in Turkey” as part of the panel “Emerson Abroad.”
January 8–11, 2026 (Toronto, Canada): At the Modern Language Association, I will present the paper “‘Science is very near us’: Dickinson and the Poetics of Science” as part of the Margaret Fuller Society panel. I will also present the paper “Science and Small Forms: Franklin and the Early Modern Aphorism” as part of a roundtable organized by the Society of Early Americanists.
March 12–14, 2026 (Cincinnati, Ohio, USA): At C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, I will present the paper “‘The Senses Interfere Everywhere’: Caving with Emerson and Poe.”
Fall 2026 (Baltimore, Maryland, USA): At the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers (ALSCW), I will present a paper drawn from Aphoristic Science as part of the panel “American Literary Fragments and Other Short Forms.”
See abstracts from my recent conference presentations here.
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