Posted Date: July 9, 2021
Episode Description: In this episode, LAC member Merve Tabur interviews Dr. Gizem Yılmaz Karahan. Dr. Yılmaz Karahan discusses her research on written and visual representations of disease and contagion in the writings of the Ottoman traveller Evliya Çelebi (1611-1682) and in the medical illustrations of an Ottoman surgeon, Şerafeddin Sabuncuğlu (1385-1468). Putting ancient Greek, Arab, and Ottoman Turkish philosophies and scientific discourses in conversation with contemporary discussions on posthumanism and material ecocriticism, Dr. Yılmaz Karahan underlines the significance of historical and cross-cultural analyses in addressing ecological and public health issues today.
Guest Biography
Dr. Z. Gizem Yılmaz Karahan works as an Assistant Professor at Social Sciences University of Ankara in the Department of English Language and Literature. She obtained her PhD with her dissertation on early modern English drama (excluding Shakespeare), elemental ecocriticism, and ecophobia in 2018 at Hacettepe University, Ankara. Her recent publications include articles entitled “Airy Agency in Early Modern English Drama: Ho Trilogy” (English Studies 101. 5) and “Ecophobia as Artistic Entertainment” (ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 26.2), and a co-authored book chapter entitled “The Ecophobia/Biophilia Spectrum in Turkish Theatre: Anatolian Village Plays and (Karagöz-Hacivat) Shadow Plays” (co-authored with Simon C. Estok, Lexington Books, 2020).
Project Abstract
Viral agents point to vibrant ecologies in their co-evolution with other living matter, forming hybrid configurations. However, the porosity of bodies and the intra-dependence of material and discursive practices reveal lethal stories, whose assemblage of narrative capacity unfolds in what Donna Haraway calls “inheritance of multispecies histories.” In the interest of tracking the storytelling processes beyond human imagination, my work invites a re-thinking of how humans are enmeshed with nonhuman stories ascribed in human and nonhuman bodies, elements, the physical environments, cultural practices, the Earth, the planets, and the cosmos. My work also analyses contagious diseases as a natural-cultural amalgam that is narrating an enmeshed story extending beyond spatial-temporal limits with references to the travel writings of the Ottoman explorer and traveller Evliya Çelebi (1611-1682) who mentions how contagious diseases transform cultural formations, providing a posthuman narration linking human and nonhuman imagination. My work further exemplifies the medical miniatures on contagious diseases such as plague by the surgeon Şerefeddin Sabuncuoğlu (1385-1468), who is the writer of the earliest pediatric surgical atlas, Cerrâhiyyetü’l Hâniyye (1465), and Mücerreb-Nâme (1468). Taking elemental [water] and acoustic [music] agencies along with seasonal changes into consideration, Sabuncuoğlu also provides certain ingredients for the medical pastes and ointments against the plague. As a repository of knowledge, experience, diseases, treatments, imagination, locations, momentums, energies, and certain times, these examples, just like the current Sars-CoV-2 outbreak, reveal an interplay of matter and meaning, that is mind and body, exemplifying constant onto-episte-mologies, in Karen Barad’s term.
Recommended Resources
- Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Duke University Press, 2007)
- Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (University of Minnesota Press, 2008)
- Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann (eds.), Material Ecocriticism (Indiana University Press, 2014)
- Anthony Kenny, Ancient History: A New History of Western Philosophy, Volume 1, (University of Oxford Press, 2004)