Professor
E-Mail: dturk@bilkent.edu.tr
Office Location: G-115
Phone: +90 (312) 290 1723
Full CV
Lale Demirturk received her M.A. from the American Studies, the University of Iowa, in July 1982. She also received her Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Iowa in 1986. Her dissertation on immigrant women’s autobiographies, Female Identity in Cross-Cultural Perspective: Immigrant Women’s Autobiographies was published by UMI in 1987. She has published various articles on 20th century American novels, and especially on the novels of Richard Wright. She has taught undergraduate classes on 19th and 20th c. American novel. Her book, Modern African American Novel (in Turkish) came out in 1997.
Some of her articles have appeared in Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, College Literature, Mississippi Quarterly, and Melus. Her current research interests are on contemporary African American novel and postcolonial theory. She is currently working on a book-length project on the African American novel. Her book, entitled How Black Writers Deal With Whiteness: Characterization Through Deconstructing Color, was published by The Edwin Mellen Press in May 2008. In addition, her book The Contemporary African American Novel: Multiple Cities, Multiple Subjectivities, and Discursive Practices of Whiteness in Everyday Urban Encounters was published by Fairleigh Dickinson University Press and Rowman & Littlefield in 2012, followed by the paperback edition in 2014. Her recent book The Twenty-first Century African American Novel and the Critique of Whiteness in Everyday Life: Blackness as Strategy for Social Change was published by Lexington Books in May 2016. Her latest book is African American Novels in the Black Lives Matter Era: Transgressive Performativity of Black Vulnerability as Praxis in Everyday Life (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2019).
She has published two books in Turkish, including 21. Yüzyılda Küresel(leşen) Tehdit Amerika: Batı’nın Siyasî Projesi “Beyaz” Egemen Dünya (America as the Global(izing) Threat in the 21st Century: The White Dominant World as the Political Project of the West) (Istanbul: Kopernik Kitap, 2020), and Amerika’da Irkçı Söylem ve Şiddet: Siyahları “Öldürme” Politikasının Açılımı (Understanding the White Dominant Discourse in the 21st c. America) (Istanbul: Kopernik Kitap, 2021).
Her article “George Yancy’s Embodied Critical Space of Antiracist Praxis” was recently published in George Yancy: A Critical Introduction, edited by Kimberley Ducey, Clevis E. Headley, and Joe R. Feagin (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2021).
She has had a keen interest in amateur photography.