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Erdag Göknar

Associate Professor in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies
Asian & Middle Eastern Studies
2204 Erwin Road, Rm. 234, Box 90414, Durham, NC 27708-0414
2204 Erwin Road, Durham, NC 27708
Office hours Fridays, 1-3 PM  

Overview


Erdağ Göknar is Associate Professor of Turkish in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University and former director of the Duke Middle East Studies Center. He is a scholar of literary and cultural studies and an award-winning translator whose research and publications focus on intersections of literature and politics in Turkey and the Middle East; specifically, on late Ottoman legacies in contemporary Turkish fiction, historiography, and popular culture.

He is the recipient of two NEA literature fellowships (translation), two Fulbright awards, and residential fellowships at the National Humanities Center and the Stanford Humanities Center.

His books include a monograph entitled Orhan Pamuk, Secularism and Blasphemy: The Politics of the Turkish Novel (Routledge, 2013); a co-edited volume, Mediterranean Passages: Readings from Dido to Derrida (UNC Press, 2008); and English-language translations of Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’s A Mind at Peace (Archipelago Books, 2011); Orhan Pamuk’s My Name is Red (Knopf, 2010; 2001) and Atiq Rahimi’s Earth and Ashes (Harcourt, 2002). His current project focuses on cosmopolitanism, political violence and the Allied occupation of Istanbul after WWI.

Current Appointments & Affiliations


Associate Professor in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies · 2015 - Present Asian & Middle Eastern Studies, Trinity College of Arts & Sciences

In the News


Published April 11, 2024
Spring Books by Duke Authors: Meditations, Baseball, Rebels and Stomach Pains
Published February 6, 2024
Thirty Interviews and 40 Years: Conversations with a Nobel Laureate
Published March 10, 2022
Reading the Archives of a Tragic Period of Middle East History

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Recent Publications


The postsecular imaginaries of Orhan Pamuk's novels

Journal Article Literature and Theology · June 1, 2024 This article argues that Orhan Pamuk's literary innovations bring formations of religion and secularism separated by ideologies of Turkish modernization and cultural revolution into productive parity. Pamuk's depictions of the Ottoman Islamic past and its ... Full text Cite

"The Light of the Bosphorus: Photography in Orhan Pamuk's 'Balkon'"

Other Los Angeles Review of Books · May 19, 2019 ORHAN PAMUK’S PHOTOGRAPHS emerge from a specific and recurring moment. As much as they capture subtle aspects of Istanbul geography in and around the iconic confluence of the Bosphorus and the Golden Horn, they also reveal the moments when the writer stops ... Link to item Cite
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Recent Grants


Duke-UNC Consortium for Middle East Studies

Institutional SupportPrincipal Investigator · Awarded by University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill · 2014 - 2019

QFI Summer Workshop 2018

ConferencePD/PI · Awarded by Qatar Foundation International · 2018 - 2018

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Education, Training & Certifications


University of Washington · 2004 Ph.D.
University of Washington · 1998 M.A.
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor · 1988 B.A.