Current Members

Dolcerocca is Associate Professor of Literature at the University of Bologna. She received her PhD degree in Comparative Literature from New York University in 2016. She is author of two books and eighteen scholarly articles and three book chapters, including The Oxford Handbook of Decadence, and the guest editor of the special issue in the journal of Middle Eastern Literatures. She has delivered over thirty conference papers and talks internationally. She is awardee of the ERC project “Modernizing Empires: Enlightenment, Nationalist Vanguards and Non-Western Literary Modernities”. Her research focuses on literary theory, comparative literature, modernism, nineteenth-century cultural history, narratology, and digital humanities. Özen Dolcerocca is Member of the Young Academy of Europe (YAE) and currently serves as Delegate for Scholars Residing outside the United States and Canada and as Executive Council Member of West Asian Languages Literatures and Cultures Forum at the Modern Literature Association. She is part of the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, Nominating Body Committee Member in Turkey. She chaired the Committee of Judges for the American Comparative Literature Association’s Owen Aldridge Prize Committee (2019-2021). She chaired the Department of Comparative Literature at Koc University (KU) in Turkey (2019-2021) and set up the Master’s program of the Department in collaboration with the Council of Higher Education (2021). She served as a Member of the Quality Commission Initiative at KU, as the Chair of Research Assessment in the Humanities (2017). She has in her university as Senator Elect, Co-Advocacy Chair (2012), President Elect of the Graduate Student Government and Graduate Curriculum Committee Member, and as Member of the Committee on Discipline at New York University (2013). She is the recipient of KU. Outstanding Faculty Award (2020) and the Dean’s Outstanding Teaching Award, New York University (2013).

Kirill Zubkov is a postdoctoral researcher. He received his degree at St. Petersburg State University in 2011. Between 2011-2019, Zubkov worked a teaching assistant and later became an assistant professor at St. Petersburg State University. Later he became an associate professor at Higher School of Economics (Moscow), where he was working in 2019-2023. From 2011 to 2022 Zubkov was a research fellow at the Institute of Russian Literature (St. Petersburg). In 2019 Zubkov visited New York University (USA) as a short-time fellow; in 2022 he was a foreign visitor at the Slavic-Eurasian Research Center (Hokkaido University, Japan). His research interests focus on institutional history of Russian literature of the 19th century, including the history of literary journals, theatre, censorship and other agencies that informed the literary history. Zubkov published in reviewed journals such as Russian Literature and Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie. He also published monographs on the history of literary prizes in Russia and on censorship in the Russian Empire.

Dr Naomi Charlotte Fukuzawa works as postdoctoral fellow for modern Japan in the ERC-funded research cluster NonWestLit at Bologna University in Italy studying Meiji periodicals. She obtained her PhD about Narrating Modern Japan in Comparative literature from UCL University College London in the United Kingdom, with association to Japanese Studies SOAS in 2019/20. She has presented her research on modern Japan’s eclectic hybridity based on the selected four writers internationally on academic conferences and has published articles with SFLGC in France or with PMLA Publications of the Modern Language Association of America. She has studied Comparative literature, Japanese Studies and Political Sciences at Freie University Berlin and briefly at Sciences Po Paris.

Mehtap Ozdemir is a postdoctoral research fellow in the ERC project “Modernizing Empires: Enlightenment, Nationalist Vanguards and Non-Western Literary Modernities.” She holds an MA in Comparative Literature from Istanbul Bilgi University and will soon complete her PhD in Comparative Literature at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Her dissertation documents the relationship between conceptual translation and literary modernity by tracing how the Persianate adab culture shaped Ottoman letters in the long nineteenth century. Her research traverses conceptual history, critical translation theory, literary-cultural modernity, world literature, and comparative poetics in the late Ottoman Empire. She has published in Yeni Türk Edebiyatı Dergisi and Self-Translation and Power with a forthcoming article in Critical Global Studies Beyond Eurocentrism (eds. Simon Gikandi, Laura Doyle, and Mwangi wa Gῑthῑnji).

Jennifer Flaherty is a post-doctoral researcher in Russian Studies at the University of Bologna in the ERC Project, "Modernizing Empires: Enlightenment, Nationalist Vanguards and Non-Western Literary Modernities." She received her PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley in 2019 and has held academic appointments at the College of William and Mary, Berkeley, and the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, Russia. She holds an MA in Humanities from the University of Chicago. Her research focuses on the interplay of social, political and literary forms in nineteenth-century Russian literature and European intellectual history. She has published in The Russian Review, Tolstoy Studies Journal, Russkaia literatura and PMLA. Her current book project, titled "The Unsocial Society: Peasants and the Making of Russian Literary Modernity," investigates the development of Russian realism in the context of social changes centered on the peasantry. This project was awarded a postdoctoral research fellowship at the Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia at New York University.

Zeynep Nur Şimşek is currently a PhD student in the Department of Modern Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at the University of Bologna and a researcher in the ERC-funded project NONWESTLIT. She received her MA in Turkish Literature from Bilkent University in 2021 and her BA from Istanbul Şehir University in 2018 with a dual major in History and Turkish Language and Literature. She taught Turkish courses at Bilkent University during her master's education and published articles in literary journals. She is particularly interested in Late Ottoman literature, animal studies, and minority literatures.

Hazal Bozyer is currently working as a researcher in the ERC-funded Project NONWESTLIT. She received her doctoral degree in Turkish Language and Literature from Istanbul 29 Mayis University in 2020. Her doctoral thesis supported by TUBITAK, focuses on novel and collective memory. She got her MA in Modern Turkish Literature from Marmara University Institute of Turkic Studies in 2014 and her BA from Marmara University Department of Turkish Language and Literature Teaching. She is interested in political, historical and cultural transformations in late Ottoman early Republic period texts, individual and collective memory studies, interdisciplinarity in literature and periodicals-literature relationship. Her work has been published in national journals such as the Modern Turkish Literature Researches and Monograf Journal. She is currently teaching at Istanbul Yeditepe University Turkish Language Department as a part-time lecturer.

I am currently a second year PhD student in the Department of Interdisciplinary Cultural Studies at the University of Tokyo and a doctoral researcher in the NONWESTLIT project. My research interests include East Asian supernatural fictions and visual arts, women’s writing and photography. My current project is a feminist comparative cultural study that examines the artistic and social activities of Japanese women photographers in the 20th century.

Nikita Drozdov is currently a doctoral student of the University of Helsinki writing a thesis on travel literature created by Russian visitors of Finland. He graduated from Saint Petersburg State University (Russia) in 2009 and in 2013 defended his first disseration on the reception of French literature in 1830s Russia. In 2014-2016 he worked as a junior researcher at the Institute of Russian Literature (Pushkin House) researching Russian and european literature of the 18th and the 19th centuries. His sphere of interests includes reception studies, history of romanticism, criticism and gothic novels. He has published a number of articles and commentaries, encyclopedic articles and rare archival materials.
He takes part in the NONWESTLIT project as a research assistant working with Russian periodicals and bibliographies, which have been of interest to him since early stages of his research career. 

Emre Akbas is an assistant professor at the Department of Computer Engineering, Middle East Technical University (METU). Prior to joining METU, he was a postdoctoral research associate at the Vision and Image Understanding Lab, Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, University of California Santa Barbara. He received his PhD degree from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His BS and MS degrees are both from the Department of Computer Engineering, METU. His research focuses on machine learning, deep learning and computer vision. 

Gokcen Gokceoglu’s research focuses on deep learning, reinforcement learning and computer vision. She is one of the researchers of the ‘Modernizing Empires: Enlightenment, Nationalist Vanguards and Non-Western Literary Modernities (NONWESTLIT)’. Her primary role is performing the computational analysis of literary texts from Russia, Turkey, and Japan during the modernization period with the help of state of the art research on Natural Language Processing.

She graduated from Electrical and Electronics department in Bilkent University. She is currently a PhD student in Computational Engineering.