I am a scholar of poetry and poetics, exploring how poetic styles evolve through diachronic and comparative lenses with a particular focus on plainness, abstraction, and formalism.
At Stanford, my doctoral work emerged from a deep-seated skepticism toward a particular strain of modern poetry which seeks to “go in fear of abstractions.” I examined various departures from Symbolist and Modernist traditions, focusing on the poetry of late Wallace Stevens, the New York School, and the various strands of mid-century formalism. A key aspect of that formalist effort was a return to historical models, exemplified by Yvor Winters, who ultimately rejected his early affinities with Imagism to revive the Renaissance plain style as a viable alternative to modernist aesthetics. His influence is evident in many mid-century poets who studied with him, most notably Thom Gunn, whose work and engagement with plain style is central to my research. To historicize plain style and understand its social, political, and gendered implications, I often return to the sixteenth century, writing extensively on poets like George Turberville and Isabella Whitney. I am especially interested the connection between poetic and bodily language, particularly how poetry can embody gestural expressions.
My comparative work extends my interests in poetics and modernism into a variety of poetic traditions. In the Turkish context, I investigate the diverse expressions of plainness that emerged during the late-Ottoman modernization and the early Republican period. I examine poets like Cenap Şehabettin, Yahya Kemal Beyatlı, Cahit Sıtkı Tarancı, Ahmet Muhip Dıranas, and ZiyaOsman Saba to analyze the history of the sonnet in Turkish, the evolution of syllabic poetry, and the varied responses to the image-oriented poetics of the İkinci Yeni movement. In the Irish context, I explore how the Irish Literary Revival articulates distinct demands on mid-century departures from modernism, focusing on poets like Eavan Boland and Seamus Heaney. I am currently writing a monograph based on my archival research on the Irish poet Blanaid Salkeld.
Translation is at the heart of my literary approach. I am fascinated by how poetic forms evolve and travel, and I love discussing the global history of the sonnet, the ghazal, and dawn poems (aubade). I have written about translations of Shakespeare into Turkish. My co-translation of Ahmet Midhat Efendi’s Felatun Bey and Rakım Efendi was published by Syracuse University Press, and my co-translation of my favorite Turkish novel, Abdülhak Şinasi Hisar’s Fahim Bey ve Biz (Mister Fahim), is forthcoming in Autumn 2024.