About us
Some of us are faculty members at different North American institutions of higher education who work on various aspects of Ottoman and Turkish language and literature. Some of us write poetry, prose or travel literature or work with manuscripts. We all share a love of Ottoman, Turkish and Turkic languages and literatures.
Roberta Micallef is Professor of the Practice in the Department of World Languages and Literatures at Boston University where she teaches courses on Turkish language and literature, contemporary Middle Eastern Literature and Cinema, as well as Travel Literature. She is part of the BU MFA in literary translation steering committee. Roberta is also an active member of the Turkish language teaching community. She has served as the Executive Secretary and the President of the American Association of Teachers of Turkic Languages. Her professional and personal interests intersect in travel. She is one of the founding members of the BU Travel Studies Group which has been active since 2007. Roberta is the co-editor of their first volume: On the Wonders of Land and Sea Persianate Travel Writing (2013) and editor of Illusion and Disillusionment Travel Writing in the Modern Age (2018), their second volume. She contributed a chapter titled, “Lady Craven and Ladies of the Ottoman Empire: When Travel Doesn’t Enlighten” to the third volume: Worlds of Knowledge in Women’s Travel Writing (2022). The research group is in the process of preparing its fourth volume for publication. When Roberta isn’t teaching or working on research projects or hanging out with her family, she is most likely traveling to places near and far.
Efe Murat Balıkçıoğlu is a scholar of classical and post-classical Islamic intellectual history He holds A.M. and Ph.D. degrees in History and Islamic Studies from Harvard University. Dr. Balıkçıoğlu is an anthologized poet, and has published several volumes of poetry and poetry translations in Turkey, under the pseudonym Efe Murad, including the first complete translation of Ezra Pound’s Cantos in Turkish, as well as volumes by American poets Susan Howe, Lyn Hejinian, and C.K. Williams. His poems, writings, and translations in English have appeared in a wide range of journals, including Guernica, Five Points, Jacket2, Two Lines, The Critical Flame, Denver Quarterly, Talisman, and The
American Reader, and in exhibitions including the 13th Istanbul Biennale. A recipient of “Meral Divitçi Prize for Turkish Poetry in Translation” together with poet Sidney Wade, he prepared a selection from the œuvres of the Turkish modernist poet Melih Cevdet Anday under the title Silent Stones (Talisman Press, 2017). His poetry has been translated into English, Dutch, and Persian.
Nilüfer Hatemi received her PhD (“Unfolding a Life: Marshal Fevzi Çakmak’s Diaries”) in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University in 2000 and worked as an assistant professor at Yeditepe and Kadir Has Universities, Istanbul, Turkey. At Princeton, she teaches courses on Turkish and Ottoman language and literature (some of which are: TUR 305, “Advanced Turkish: Selected Readings in Historical and Literary Texts,” TUR 424, “Turkish Language in Translation: from Ömer Seyfettin to Orhan Pamuk,” and NES 504, “Introduction to Ottoman Turkish”).
Esra Özdemir is the Turkish language coordinator and instructor at Brown University. She received her PhD in Teaching English as a Second or Foreign Language from Istanbul University. In addition to being an avid reader and traveller, she is also an active member of the American Association of Teachers of Turkic Languages.
Eleanor (Nell) Wright is a writer and translator from New Jersey. She holds a BA in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University, where she focused on contemporary Turkish literature, and an MFA in creative writing (poetry) from NYU. She has lived and taught in Nuuk, Greenland and in Tatarstan, Russia, and she currently does both in New York. Her poems appear in The New Yorker, The Yale Review, The Iowa Review, and elsewhere, and she serves as poetry editor for the journal American Chordata.