Welcoming Visiting Professor Meltem Turkoz

The Folklore Department is pleased to welcome Professor Meltem Turkoz to UC Berkeley to teach as a visiting faculty member for Spring 2020.

Her bio reads:

“As a scholar I am interested the way cultural practices become the focus of modification and transaction by state and non-state actors during processes of socio-political change. My book Naming and Nation-Building in Turkey: the 1934 Surname Law (2018) examines the reception of the Surname Law of 1934 through oral history and archival and literary print materials. In documenting the processes of onomastic nation-building, I explore how newly created surnames become attached to their bearers through what Agha calls “discursive regularity” of agents of power and through “traffic habits” (Anderson) within local and national economies of meaning.

My recent work has involved the study of festivals, food activism and utopias, ritual laughter and memory, and refugee-host community projects focusing on oral history, advocacy and cultural programming. I am also developing a project on the practice, theory and technologies of puppetry.  

I was first drawn to the study of verbal arts and narrative in folklore—coming from a previous career as a short story writer and journalist—and came of age as an academic folklorist at the University of Pennsylvania’s program where the historicized study of folklore, nationalism and nation-building dovetailed with theories of performance.

I have a longstanding interest in experiential education and have designed and taught community involvement courses partnered with local directorates of education in Şile, and with communities in Mardin and Istanbul. In other pedagogic involvements, I take part in an ongoing multi-disciplinary educational venture on the Olive, held on the Aegean coast of Turkey. As a writer of fiction and poetry I sometimes take the stage at Istanbul Spoken Word.”