Assistant Professor

E-Mail: kara.mccormack@bilkent.edu.tr
Phone: +90 (312) 290 1727
Office: G-115B

Full CV

Kara McCormack is an American cultural studies scholar, with a focus on the American West and science fiction, including (but not limited to) film, television, and public space. She received her PhD in American Studies from the University of New Mexico.

Her work has been published in The Journal of American Studies, The Journal of Arizona History, and by the Lane Center for the American West at Stanford University. Her first book, Imagining Tombstone: The Town too Tough to Die, was published by the University Press of Kansas in 2016; a chapter from this book, “Historians’ Gunfight,” was reprinted in A Wyatt Earp Anthology: Long May His Story Be Told, by the University of North Texas Press in 2019.

Her 2022 essay, “Searching for Wyatt Earp in Anatolia: The American West in the Turkish Imagination,” examines the ways the West as a global mythic site has been transformed into a local expression of Turkish identity. This work was published in a special issue of the Journal of Arizona History, for which she also served as guest editor.

More recent academic work explores the ways the tropes of the American West emerge in and intersect with science fiction. Her article, “Home. Family. Future: Authenticity, the Frontier Myth, and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes,” was published in ContactZone: Journal of the Italian Association for the Study of Science Fiction and Fantasy in the spring of 2022. Forthcoming from The Journal of American Studies is an explication of the use of the frontier myth in the region known as the Colonies in Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale. In the works is a study of the intersection of race, memory, and UFO tourism in Roswell, New Mexico, and a mapping of E.M. Forster’s conception of “the imponderable bloom” onto Apple TV’s Silo.

She has taught American studies courses at the University of New Mexico, Stanford University, and Tufts University. At Bilkent, she teaches Introduction to American Studies I and II, Imagining the American West, and Science Fiction in American Culture.