This essay examines the development of prison memoirs in modern Iranian prose, with a focus on how literary texts function as a tribunal, delivering forms of justice missing from the existing legal system. It constructs from the prison memoirs of a range of dissident writers (Dashti, ʿAlavi, and Baraheni) a genealogy of prison consciousness in…[Read more]

On structural similarities in Azeri of Iran and Gagauz due to contact with Indo-Iranan languages

On an isogloss of the Eastern Turkish dialects

On Armenian loanwords in the Turkish dialects of Erzurum

On loanwords in Gagauz, a Turkic language spoken in the Republic of Moldovs, the Ukraine and Bulgaria.

Article on several syntactic characteristics of Gagauz complex sentences, which developed under the influence of the dominant Slavic languages.

Article on the influence of the Slavic languages Bulgarian and Russian on Gagauz, a Turkish dialect spoken in the Republic of Moldova, the Ukraine and Bulgaria.

Due to language-contact phenomena Gagauz shows significant deviations from Turkic patterns, most obvious on the syntactic level. In what follows, I will deal with a set of modal constructions expressing volition, necessity, ability and possibility. Expressions for volition and necessity are formed in Gagauz analytically using the same lexical and…[Read more]

This article aims to describe some types of adverbial clauses in the dialects of Erzurum.
For this purpose I have investigated published and unpublished material collected in the
region between 1966 and 1980. I concentrated on converb forms and clause patterns that
are unusual from the viewpoint of Standard Turkish. The converb forms are either…[Read more]

This article explores a unique series of caricatures made between 1884 and 1896 by Yusuf Franko Kusa, a high-ranking Ottoman bureaucrat and a vener- ated member of n-de-siècle Pera’s high society. Yusuf Franko’s hitherto unstudied caricatures were comparable to contemporary European caricatures in style, but their subject matter was very loca…[Read more]

Section 295-C of Pakistan’s penal code prohibits insulting the Prophet and carries a mandatory death penalty. This law was passed based on a claim of ijma‘ (consensus among Islamic scholars) that such an offense is subject to a hadd (divinely fixed) punishment. Nearly half of those charged under this statute crimes of hadd are Christians, who mak…[Read more]

Part of a larger roundtable series on Arab American histories for the Journal of American Ethnic History.

While the cosmopolitan turn in political and literary theory encourages us to move beyond national frameworks, the Caucasus remains mired in ethno-national categories from the Soviet past. This essay examines how these categories are being mobilized in the service of a nominally cosmopolitan agenda in the contemporary memorialization of the writer…[Read more]

This paper assesses nine prominent readings of the imperial context/content of Verdi’s ‘Aida’ and offers a new perspective more adequate to basic tensions in the work. Readings have ranged from the literal (imperial Europe here stages an archaeological “ancient Egypt”) to the metaphorical (“Egypt” here is any repressive government). Or–somew…[Read more]

Commentators often express disappointment that the music for the main characters in _Aida_ is not more distinctive, i.e., does not make much use of the exotic styles that mark the work’s ceremonial scenes and ballets. It has also been argued that exotic style-elements here are mostly confined to female, hence powerless, characters. Such…[Read more]

The purpose of this study was to examine hockey’s identity, how the game constructs identity, and how the increasing participation of females in hockey in Canada and Turkey is altering identity. Through qualitative research and personal experience it is revealed that in order for hockey and Turkey to modernize, a new male identity needs to e…[Read more]

This study attempts to investigate the salient features of Turkish literary criticism through deconstructing the concepts of language, aesthetics and ideology intersecting the disciplines of sociology and history. It questions the nationality of the self-evident category of “Turkish literature” exploring in what ways the Turkish Literary Criticism…[Read more]