Membri & Collaboratori Attuali

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.

Taka Oshikiri obtained her PhD from School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Her publications include Gathering for Tea in Modern Japan: Class, Culture and Consumption in the Meiji Period (2018) and ‘Selling Tea as Japanese History: Culture, Consumption and International Expositions, 1873–1910’ (2021). Her current research explores Japan’s cultural modernisation in the late nineteenth and early twenties centuries.

Zeynep Nur Şimşek is a junior postdoctoral researcher in the ERC-funded project NONWESTLIT: Modernizing Empires: Enlightenment, Nationalist Vanguards and Non-Western Literary Modernities, where she has conducted research on late Ottoman periodicals, literary debates, and concepts since 2021. She earned her PhD in Modern Languages, Literatures, and Cultures from the University of Bologna in 2025. Her dissertation, Western Sun, Ottoman Apocalypse: Voltaire, Rousseau, and the Enlightenment in Late Ottoman Literary Culture, examines the reception of French Enlightenment thought in the late Ottoman Empire through textual circulation, translation, and reinterpretation. She holds an MA in Turkish Literature from Bilkent University (2021), where her master’s thesis focused on evolutionary thought and primate narratives in late Ottoman literature. Her research interests encompass late Ottoman literature, literary modernization, intellectual and conceptual history, Enlightenment studies, translation, animal studies, and primate narratives.

Marina Osipova is a PhD student in the Department of Modern Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at the University of Bologna, specializing in comparative studies and cultural anthropology. Her research encompasses Russian minorities, Russian history, and literature, with a particular focus on late nineteenth-century literary texts. She is actively involved in the ERC-funded project "Modernizing Empires: Enlightenment, Nationalist Vanguards and Non-Western Literary Modernities" (NONWESTLIT), where she selects and analyzes literary works from this pivotal era. Marina graduated with a Master's degree in Russian history from the Higher School of Economics in 2024, following her Bachelor's degree in History from Udmurt State University in 2021. During her academic journey, she participated in an exchange program in Helsinki in 2020, further enriching her understanding of historical narratives. Her research interests also extend to minority literatures and decolonial studies, particularly concerning the endangered minorities within the Russian Empire."

Hazal Bozyer is currently working as an archival researcher on the ERC-funded project NONWESTLIT: Modernizing Empires: Enlightenment, Nationalist Vanguards and Non-Western Literary Modernities. From December 2024 to September 2025, she conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Bologna with the support of a TÜBİTAK 2219 International Postdoctoral Research Fellowship. Her research project, titled “Debating Literature, Shaping Modernity: The Literary Discussions and Concepts in the Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Empire”, examines literary debates in Turkish-language periodicals of the late Ottoman and early Republican periods, the key concepts emerging from these debates, and their relationship to processes of literary modernization. As part of this research, she compiled literary debates from contemporary newspapers and journals into a digital database, exploring the relationships between literature, culture, and modernization within a conceptual and historical framework. She received her PhD from İstanbul 29 Mayıs University in 2020 with a dissertation titled “The Traces of Collective Memory in Refik Halid Karay’s Works”. She completed both her BA and MA degrees at Marmara University (2012/2014). Her research interests include late Ottoman and early Republican Turkish literature, literary modernization, literary debates, conceptual history, individual and collective memory, the relationship between periodicals and literature and digital humanities. Her research has been published in national and international academic journals. She currently teaches at İstanbul 29 Mayıs University and Yeditepe University and works as an editor at VakıfBank Kültür Yayınları.

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. 

Antea Tokić is currently a PhD student at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb. She received her MA and BA degrees in History and Russian Language and Literature from the same institution.

Mehtap Ozdemir worked as a postdoctoral research fellow in the ERC project “Modernizing Empires: Enlightenment, Nationalist Vanguards and Non-Western Literary Modernities.” She is currently a lecturer at Emory University and collaborates with project members. 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).

Giulia Colelli is a researcher with a PhD in Modern Languages and Cultures with a focus on Japanese Studies at the University of Bologna. Their main research interests include contemporary Japanese literature, Women and Gender Studies, and Dystopian and Utopian Studies. Their doctoral research focused on dystopian novels and manga published in Japan after the Fukushima disaster in March 2011. They have been working with the NONWESTLIT project since 2025.

Sarp Kantar is a graduate researcher in the ERC-funded project NONWESTLIT and an M.Sc. student in Computer Engineering at Middle East Technical University (METU), where he also received his B.Sc. degree. His research interests include deep learning, computer vision, natural language processing, and large language models. Within NONWESTLIT, he works on the collection, processing, organization, and analysis of historical literary data. He also investigates and develops machine learning and language processing methods for working with these materials.