For the first time as a group, all full-time faculty members in American Culture and Literature participated in the International American Studies Association World Congress 2025, held at Hacetteppe University, 14-16 May. The topic of this year’s congress was “Visualizing Americas: Image, Text, Performance.”
Assistant professors Kyra Sutton, Kara McCormack, and Britain Hopkins presented papers unified under the theme of “Visualizing the Intangible.” Professor Sutton’s “Imagining the Void: The Elliptical in Contemporary Anglo-American Poetics” examined the interplay of text and image in what she calls elliptical forms. Professor McCormack presented “Seeking the ‘Imponderable Bloom’: Wilderness and the Sublime in ‘The Machine Stops’ and Silo,” which explores the ways the wilderness and the sublime are employed in science fiction. And Professor Hopkins presented “The political aesthetics of student loan debt and self-discipline in life online,” an exploration of how some student loan debtors in the U.S. bring their debts to life online through personal YouTube channels.
Associate Professor Daniel Johnson and assistant professor Patrick McDonald of AMER were joined by Hacetteppe instructor Dicle Çetin to present their works on “Imagining the Elsewhere.” Professor Johnson’s “To the Land of Virginny: Envisioning the New World in 17th-Century Broadside” examined the ways the New World was often negatively represented in broadside ballads popular in Britain in the 1600s. Professor McDonald’s “On Not Reading American Board Reports: Visualizing Missionary Activity in the Nineteenth-Century” examined the ways Christian missionaries imagined the world through their creation of maps. And Dicle Çetin presented an analysis of the work of Maryse Condé and her critique of romanticized understandings of Africa in her paper, “Caribbean Négritude: Visions of Africa in the Work and Life of Maryse Condé.”
Bookended by the keynote speech by Djelal Kadir on “Imaging America: The Road Not Taken and the Triumph of Optics” and a reception that featured a full buffet and lively discussion with academics from other universities, the IASA World Congress lived up to its name. It was a pleasure for AMER to represent Bilkent University at this auspicious event.
