C. Ceyhun Arslan

Overview

Dr. Arslan’s research interests include Arabic and Turkish literatures, Mediterranean studies, and literary theory. He is also the co-editor-in-chief of the journal Middle Eastern Literatures (https://www.tandfonline.com/journals/came20).

His publications have appeared in top journals and edited volumes of different fields and disciplines, such as Middle Eastern Literatures (2016), Comparative Literature Studies (2017), Journal of Arabic Literature (2019), Akdeniz İnsani Bilimler Dergisi (2019), Journal of Mediterranean Studies (2019), Convivium: Exchanges and Interactions in the Arts of Medieval Europe, Byzantium, and the Mediterranean (2021), The Routledge Handbook of Arabic Poetry (2023), Sea of Literatures: Towards a Theory of Mediterranean Literature (2023), Utopian Studies (2024), Cambridge History of Middle Eastern Modernism (forthcoming), and The Routledge Handbook to Global Literature and Culture in the Romantic Era (forthcoming).

Dr. Arslan’s first book, The Ottoman Canon and the Construction of Arabic and Turkish Literatures, has been published by Edinburgh University Press in March 2024, and it appeared in the influential Edinburgh Studies on the Ottoman Empire series (https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-the-ottoman-canon-and-the-construction-of-arabic-and-turkish-literatures.html). The Ottoman Canon and the Construction of Arabic and Turkish Literatures fleshes out the Ottoman canon’s multilingual character to call for a literary history that can reassess and even move beyond categories that many critics take for granted, such as “classical Arabic literature” and “Ottoman literature.” It gives a historically contextualized close reading of works from authors who have been studied as pioneers of Arabic and Turkish literature, such as Ziya Pasha, Jurjī Zaydān, Maʿrūf al-Ruṣāfī, and Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar. The Ottoman Canon analyzes how these authors prepared the arguments and concepts that shape contemporary studies on Arabic and Turkish literatures as they reassessed the relationship among the Ottoman canon’s linguistic traditions. He has already been invited to give book talks at Columbia University, Harvard University, Mainz University, Princeton University, Stanford University, and the University of Texas at Austin. This book’s Turkish translation will be published by Koç University Press.

Dr. Arslan is now working on his second book, entitled Becoming Mediterranean: The Sea Reconfigured in Arabic, French, and Turkish Literatures, which has received support from the European Commission’s Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation’s Georg Forster Fellowship for Experienced Researchers. This book examines how authors who were born in Ottoman Empire during its final years and spent the rest of their lives in nation-states, as the book puts it, “thought with the Mediterranean” in order to lay out the basis for modern cultural and political identities. It argues that their writings give us a basis from which we can criticize more prevalent, institutionalized, Orientalist assumptions about the sea since they did not have the political, financial, and institutional backup that many Orientalist writers did. Becoming Mediterranean addresses scholars of Mediterranean literature, world literature, and Middle Eastern literatures. The book shifts the focus of Mediterranean studies to the sea’s eastern and southern shores; it demonstrates how the postcritical turn in literary studies can offer a repertoire of new concepts and phrases that shed a new light on the world literature scholarship; and its Mediterranean framework offers new interpretations on well-known works of Middle Eastern literatures.

Most of the courses Dr. Arslan has taught on ancient Greek literature, nineteenth-century literature, Ottoman literature, Mediterranean literature, and world literature have been ranked as among the top courses in student evaluations. He will be happy to supervise undergraduate and postgraduate students who wish to pursue academic careers. He has supervised two MA students who have completed their theses, and they have started their PhD programs in Comparative Literature at Stanford University and the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Research areas

Education

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