Associate Professor of German Ela Gezen to Deliver Keynote on "Cultures of/in Migration: Turkish Artists in West Berlin"

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Ela Gezen, associate professor of German, will deliver the keynote lecture for German Studies at this year's Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA) conference held March 7-10 in Boston. Gezen will speak on "Cultures of/in Migration: Turkish Artists in West Berlin."

"I am very excited about this opportunity to share my research in this context and look forward to ensuing exchanges with colleagues," Gezen says.

Gezen's talk will focus on multi-genre exhibits co-organized by the Turkish Association of Academics and Artists, which will be discussed as a key part of the formation of a Turkish public sphere in West Berlin. Turkish artists, intellectuals, and academics founded numerous associations in West Berlin throughout the 1970s and 1980s to establish institutional settings for cultural activities. Central objectives were the promotion of Turkish culture beyond folklorization, the formulation of common interests, and the facilitation of collaborations. In addition to reading these as a current within broader efforts to represent Turkish culture as multi-layered and as essential to public-political debates on integration, the talk will also address how to relate cultural activities in the early phase of Turkish migration to cultural practices and interventions today.

Gezen is Associate Professor of German at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her research and teaching focus on 20th- and 21-century German literature and culture, with emphases on literatures of migration, minority discourses, and transnationalism. Her first book Brecht, Turkish Theater, and Turkish-German Literature studies the significance of Bertolt Brecht for Turkish and Turkish-German literature. Currently, she is working on her second book, "Cultures in Migration," which examines cultural practices by Turkish artists throughout the 1970s.