A Panel of Experts: "Turkish Literature & Culture in Translation, Remembering Rumi”

Tuesday, May 8, 2007
7:00 pm

The Bowery Poetry Club
308 Bowery Avenue
(Between Bleecker and Houston)
New York, NY 10012

Free admission

For additional information please call (212) 229-1207.

Bringing together leading experts on Turkish literature, which reflects a rich tradition of 1,500 years ranging from oral epics in Central Asia, such as the Dede Korkut of the Oghuz Turks, and the Manas epic of the Kyrgyz people, to the Divan and Folk literatures of the Ottoman Empire, the panel will focus on a series of topics that have dominated the academic discourse in Turkish literature. These topics are namely the 13th-century Sufi literature and mystical poems of Mevlana Jelalludin Rumi in recognition of the 2007 International Year of Rumi as designated by UNESCO; the themes of East and West in Turkish literature ranging from the Orhon inscriptions to Orhan Pamuk, the winner of the Nobel Literature Prize for 2006; the repercussions of political and social aspects of modernism in Ottoman and Republican Turkish literature; reflections of literature and society; comparative aspects of Turkish and Arabic literature; and contemporary Turkish literature.

Panelist Biographies

Prof. David C. Cuthell
David Cuthell was born in Manilla and lived in Turkey during the 1950's and 1960's. He studied English Literature at Yale and MBA at Columbia Business School. Worked on Wall Street for 20 years before returning to Columbia where he completed his PhD in History in 2004. Later, Cuthell founded the Turkish and Middle Eastern Studies Program at Stevens Institute of Technology and taught at Columbia's School of International Affairs. Currently, Mr. Cuthell is the Director of Institute of Turkish Studies (ITS) at Georgetown University.

Prof. Sibel Erol (Moderator)
Sibel Erol received a PhD in Comparative Literature PhD from University of California - Berkeley in 1993 and holds a teaching certificate and a bachelor’s degree in linguistics and literature from Bosphorus University. She taught freshman composition, Turkish language, comparative literature and women’s studies courses at Berkeley and Washington University in St. Louis before joining New York University. She studies Turkish authors of the early Republican period such as Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu, Halide Edip Adıvar and Reşat Nuri Güntekin in the context of Turkish nationalism, and she also focuses on contemporary female authors such as Adalet Ağaoğlu, Nazlı Eray and Latife Tekin. She currently teaches Turkish language and literature at the Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University, and has published articles in the Middle East Association Bulletin, Who’s Who in Contemporary Women’s Literature and Edebiyat.

Prof. Edward Foster
Formerly the poetry editor of MultiCultural Review, Edward Foster is the founding editor of Talisman: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, Talisman House, Publishers, and Jensen/Daniels, Publishers. He has been the recipient of numerous grants and awards and is the director of the Division of Humanities and Social Sciences in the Imperatore School of Sciences and Arts at the Stevens Institute of Technology. He is the author or editor of two dozen books, the most recent of which include Answerable to None: Berrigan, Bronk, and the American Real (1999), The Angelus Bell (2001), Mahrem: Things Men Should Do for Men: A Suite for O (2002); Selected Works (in Russian) (2004); and What He Ought to Know: New and Selected Poems (2006), and Selected Works (in Slovenian) (2007). With Joseph Donahue, he edited The World in Time and Space: Towards a History of Innovative Poetry in Our Time (2004), and he co-edited Naming the Nameless: Contemporary American Poetry (2006) in Romanian translation.

Frances Kazan
Frances Kazan received a bachelor’s degree in English Literature and a master’s in Turkish Studies from New York University. She is the author of Goodnight Little Sister Stein and Day and has also written three books about Turkey: Halide Edib ve Amerika (Halide Edip and America), Halide’s Gift and The Dervish (to be published by Subtext in 2008). A regular contributor to Cornucopia, she is also a member of the Society for Women Geographers, board president of The Kitchen, a performance center in Chelsea, and a board member at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn. She lives in New York and is the widow of prominent director Elia Kazan.

Murat Nemet-Nejat
Murat Nemet-Nejat graduated from Robert College in Turkey and studied literature at Amherst College and Columbia University. Married with two children, he has lived in the United States since 1959. Poet, translator and essayist, his work includes The Bridge (London: Martin Brian & O'Keeffe, Ltd., 1977); Veli, Orhan. I, Orhan Veli (New York: Hanging Loose Press, 1989); Turkish Voices (The Poetry Project, 1992); Questions of Accent (essay, The Exquisite Corpse, 1993); Ece Ayhan, A Blind Cat Black and Orthodoxies (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1997); The Peripheral Space of Photography (essay, Green Integer Press, 2003); Eda: An Anthology of  Contemporary Turkish Poetry, (Talisman House, 2004); Possibilities of Istanbul (A Visual and Textual Approach)(Nina Reisinger, Austria, 2006). Murat Nemet-Nejat is presently working on the long poem, The Structure of Escape, and the translation of Seyhan Erozelik’s poetry book Gül ve Telve (Rosestrikes and Coffee Grinds).