Erdağ Göknar

Erdağ Göknar is Associate Professor of Turkish and Middle East 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 focuses on the intersections of literature and politics in Turkey and the Middle East; specifically, on late Ottoman legacies in modern and contemporary Turkish fiction, historiography, and popular culture. His books and translations include Orhan Pamuk, Secularism and Blasphemy: The Politics of the Turkish Novel (Routledge, 2013); a co-edited sourcebook, 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; Other 2010). He has also written a collection of poetry, Nomadologies (Turtle Point, 2017), and co-edited Conversations with Orhan Pamuk (University Press of Mississippi, 2024). His articles and commentaries have appeared in South Atlantic Quarterly, the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Literature and Theology, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. He is the recipient of two NEA Translation Fellowships, and his current research focuses on intersections of law and literature in the analysis of the Allied occupation of Istanbul (1918-23) and political violence through historical legal cases.