Special Session Title: Anglophone Ottoman/Turkish Writers from the Ottoman Empire to Contemporary Turkey (Online Session)

This online session invites papers on Ottoman and Turkish women writers who wrote in English from the Ottoman period to the present, foregrounding their often-overlooked contributions to Anglophone literature, world literature, and transnational literary history. Writing across languages and geographies, these women occupied complex positionalities shaped by empire, exile, language, and gendered forms of mobility. Yet their works remain marginal within both Ottoman/Turkish literary histories and dominant narratives of Anglophone literature.

The session aims to bring together scholars working on women writers who used English as a second, adopted, or strategic literary language, including but not limited to figures such as Zeynep Hanım, Melek Hanım, Nuriye Hanım, Halide Edib Adıvar, Selma Ekrem, Emine Fuat Tugay, Şirin Devrim, Alev Lytle Croutier, Güneli Gün, as well as contemporary writers of Turkish origin writing in English. By situating these authors within broader frameworks of world Anglophone studies, life writing, feminist historiography, and transcultural literature. 

We welcome papers that address, but are not limited to, the following themes:

• Women’s life writing, memoirs, letters, petitions, and travel narratives in English

• English as a language of mediation, resistance, aspiration, or self-fashioning

• Gender, empire, and knowledge production in Anglophone Ottoman/Turkish texts

• Writing “from in-between”: exile, displacement, and linguistic homelessness

• Autoethnography, contact zones, and self-representation

• Translation, circulation, and reception histories of women’s Anglophone texts

• Reframing Ottoman/Turkish women writers within World Anglophone Studies

• Pedagogical and archival approaches to Anglophone women’s writing

• Comparative perspectives with other non-native women writers in English

The session particularly encourages contributions that recover neglected texts, rethink established literary genealogies, or propose new methodological approaches to studying Anglophone women’s writing beyond colonial and national paradigms.

Papers focusing on lesser-known writers and works are particularly encouraged.

2027 MLA Convention, January 7-10 

Please email your 250-word abstract and a short bio to emelzorluoglu@gmail.com