Keynotes

Meltem Ahıska is professor of sociology at Boğaziçi University. She has written and edited a number of books among which Occidentalism in Turkey: Questions of Modernity and National Identity in Turkish Radio Broadcasting (2010) is the most recent. Her articles and essays on Occidentalism, social memory, national identity, and gender have appeared in various journals and edited volumes.

W.J.T. Mitchell is editor of the interdisciplinary journal, Critical Inquiry, a quarterly devoted to critical theory in the arts and human sciences. A scholar and theorist of media, visual art, and literature, Mitchell is associated with the emergent fields of visual culture and iconology (the study of images across the media). He is known especially for his work on the relations of visual and verbal representations in the context of social and political issues. Under his editorship, Critical Inquiry has published special issues on public art, psychoanalysis, pluralism, feminism, the sociology of literature, canons, race and identity, narrative, the politics of interpretation, postcolonial theory, and many other topics. He has been the recipient of numerous awards including the Guggenheim Fellowship and the Morey Prize in art history given by the College Art Association of America. In 2003, he received the University of Chicago’s prestigious Faculty Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching.

Jiré Emine Gözen is professor of Media and Cultural Theory at the University of Europe for Applied Sciences, Hamburg. Her research interests include discourses and speculations about the future in literature, film and art, ideas of posthumanism and singularity, representation and mimicry in popular culture and politics, and practices of cultural remembrance.