Jocelyn Aksin

Jocelyn Aksin
Teaching Assistant Professor of German

Education

Ph.D., Germanic Languages and Literatures, Washington University in St. Louis

Intellectual Biography

Jocelyn Aksin’s research is based in Turkish-German Studies with a focus on shared memory cultures between Turkey and Germany. She has published on works by Turkish-German author/actress/playwright Emine Sevgi Özdamar and received her Ph.D. from Washington University in St. Louis with a dissertation on representations of memory in Turkish-German novels by Zafer Şenocak, Aras Ören, Feridun Zaimoglu, and Özdamar. Current projects include articles in preparation on Feridun Zaimoglu’s and Günter Senkel’s play, Schwarze Jungfrauen (2006) and on Turkish author Zülfü Livaneli’s popular novel, Serenad (2011), as well as an investigation into the history and reception of translations of Heinrich Heine’s works into Turkish. After spending nearly eight years in Istanbul, where she wrote her dissertation and worked as a language teacher, Jocelyn taught in the German Program at the University of North Carolina Greensboro before joining the Department of Germanic & Slavic Languages and Literatures at Chapel Hill in 2023.

Recent Publications

“Emine Sevgi Özdamar” Contemporary Literary Criticism. Gale-Cengage. Jan. 2023.

“A Staged Migration to Europe: Transgenerational Trauma in Özdamar’s Perikızı.” Konturen: “Writing Migration — Dissolving and Resolving Contours.” Vol. 11, (2020): 63 – 82.

“Archival Traces in Works by Emine Sevgi Özdamar: Newspapers in “Bitteres Wasser” and Die Brücke vom Goldenen Horn.” Gegenwartsliteratur: Ein germanistisches Jahrbuch. Vol.18, (2019): 253 – 269.