Joint Graduate/Undergraduate Conference of the American Studies Departments Of Turkey
Rewriting in/through American Culture and Literature
Where: online
When: October 16th-17th, 2025
Description: We are pleased to announce our third graduate/undergraduate conference on “Rewriting in/through American Culture and Literature”, to be held on October 16th-17th, 2025, which aims to explore the alluring domain of rewriting which is, by nature, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary, in the context of American culture and literature. The event is hosted by Başkent University’s American Culture and Literature Department and organized in collaboration with the American Studies Departments of Ankara University, Atatürk University, Bilkent University, Dokuz Eylül University, Ege University, Hacettepe University, Haliç University, and İstanbul University.
Analyzed and interpreted across many disciplines, rewriting primarily connotes the practice of writing-anew an already written–and sometimes long-forgotten–“text” from a fresh standpoint and, more importantly, for an alternative purpose. As Adrienne Rich points out, “[r]e-vision – the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction – is for us more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival” (18). Viewed from this perspective, while rewritings provide fruitful contexts for critical revisioning, they also inadvertently help “old texts” to reverberate in their rewritten, revised, and recontextualized versions, depicting the survival process. Evaluated through Mikhail Bakhtin’s approach of dialogism, the rewritten texts in the present also provide the intertextual links between the past and the future. In other words, if a rewriting of the past or an old text is a form of nostalgia, “[t]he fantasies of the past, determined by the needs of the present, have a direct impact on the realities of the future. The consideration of the future makes us take responsibility for our nostalgic tales” (Boym 8). As such, rewritings deserve further critical and academic scrutiny, as well as an ongoing questioning.
As such, the theme of this year’s conference will undoubtedly intrigue studies from a multiplicity of perspectives, one that manifests the boundless character of American Studies.
Initiated in 2022, the American Studies Departments of Ankara University, Atatürk University, Başkent University, Bilkent University, Dokuz Eylül University, Ege University, Hacettepe University, Haliç University, and İstanbul University collaborate in organizing undergraduate/graduate conferences.
WORKS CITED
Bakhtin, Mikhail M. The Dialogical Imagination. (C. Emerson and M. Holquist, Trans.). U of Texas P, 1981.
Boym, Svetlana. “Nostalgia and Its Discontents.” The Hedgehog Review 9.2 (Summer 2007): 7-18.
Rich, Adrienne. “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-vision.” College English. 34.1 (1972): 18-30. National Council of Teachers of English. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/375215.
Institution: Hosted by Başkent University’s American Studies Department, in collaboration with the American Studies Departments of Ankara University, Atatürk University, Bilkent University, Dokuz Eylül University, Ege University, Hacettepe University, Haliç University, and İstanbul University
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