Associate Professor of German
About
Fields of Study
- Translation Studies and World Literature
- Comparative Methodologies
- Transnationalism
- Mono- and Multilingualism Studies
Kristin Dickinson’s research on contemporary German and Turkish literature examines the potential of translation, as both a formal and a social medium, to intervene in nationalist language ideologies and nationally structured areas of study. Her teaching and publications have focused on questions of world literature, translation theory in practice, cross-linguistic remembrance, linguistic purity, and critical monolingualism.
Her current book project, Translation and the Experience of Modernity: A History of German Turkish Connectivity, traces the development of a German Turkish translational relationship from the early 19th century to the present. The historical framework of this book is informed by the centrality of large-scale translation movements to the cultural experience of modernity and the development of a national literary identity in both the German and Turkish contexts. The book nevertheless uncovers omnidirectional translation practices that exceed the realm of the national and counter Ottoman perceptions of its literary belatedness vis-à-vis the “West.” Through readings of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Sabahattin Ali, Zafer Senocak, and Orhan Pamuk, it further examines diverse forms of translation from which new modes of listening, speaking, and multidirectional remembering are negotiated for Turkish German studies in the 21st century.
Her additional projects examine performances of translation at the 2008 Frankfurt Book Fair, “Turkey in All Its Colors;” the transnational significance of the early Turkish Republican author Sabahattin Ali; and the cartographies of non-arrival, disruption, and deferral in the works of Franz Kafka and Bilge Karasu.
Education
PhD in Comparative Literature, University of California, Berkeley, 2015
Awards
Fellow, IFK, Summer Semester 2018
ACLA Bernheimer Prize for Outstanding Dissertation in Comparative Literature, 2017
Fellow, Social Science Research Council, 2013
Susan Sontag Prize for Translation, 2008
Fellow, American Research Institute in Turkey, 2006
Fellow, Robert Bosch Stiftung, 2003
