Gönül Pultar


Fahriye Gönül Pultar is a Turkish academic, scholar and novelist. Presently, she is the President of the Cultural Studies Association of Turkey and also holds the honorary title of the President of the World League of Tatars.

Biography

Education

Following her career diplomat mother, Adile Ayda, she studied in such countries as France, The Netherlands and the former Yugoslavia and received a B.A. from Robert College in Istanbul and a Ph.D. from Middle East Technical University in Ankara.

Career

After an early career in journalism, she opted for academia and has taught at METU, Boğaziçi University, Bilkent University as well as Bahçeşehir University. In 1998, she was appointed as a research fellow at the Longfellow Institute of Harvard University. She has been active in various academic associations such as the Modern Language Association, the ASA - American Studies Association and the Society for Multi-ethnic Studies Europe and the Americas .
In 1999 Pultar founded the "Group for Cultural Studies in Turkey," which later became the Cultural Studies Association of Turkey of which she has been president since. She is at present a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of Journal of Popular Culture.
Being the granddaughter of Sadri Maksudi, the leader of the short-lived "Turko-Tatar national-cultural autonomy" established right after the 1917 Revolution in Russia, she has found herself immersed in the life and culture of the autonomous republics of Tatarstan and Bashkortostan after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Awards

In 1965, she received the Robert College Cinema Club Award for her movie script “Bağbozumu ” and in 1970, the Hachette-Larousse Literature Award in France for her essay “Lettre à un Ami.” For her efforts at promoting the Tatar culture in the diaspora, she was awarded a medal in 2005 by President Vladimir Putin of Russia and in 2007 a "Rehmet Hattı" by the then President Shaimiev of Tatarstan.
In 2014, a festschrift was published in her honor, entitled A Transcultural Wanderer: A Festschrift for Gönül Pultar.

Works

Literary studies

Pultar's studies in academia have been in literary studies, mainly in the area of English/American Literature. She was the founding editor of Journal of American Studies of Turkey and also the guest editor of the September 2006 issue of Comparative American Studies, a special issue devoted to American literature in languages other than English. Her written works in this area include Technique and Tradition in Samuel Beckett's Trilogy of Novels and On the Road to Baghdad or Traveling Biculturalism: Theorizing a Bicultural Approach to Contemporary World Fiction.

Cultural studies

Originating primarily from biennial international symposia on various cultural issues which she initiated under the auspices of the Cultural Studies Association of Turkey, her written works include Kültür ve Modernite, Türk Kültürleri, İslam ve Modernite, Kimlikler Lütfen: Türkiye Cumhuriyeti'nde Kültürel Kimlik Arayışı ve Temsili, Imagined Identities: De/Construction of Culture, Ethnicity and Trans/Nationhood in the Age of Globalization. Her essay "Postmodern Resistance or Public Mask: The Islamic Veil in Europe" appeared in Post-National Enquiries: Essays on Ethnic and Racial Border Crossings edited by Jopi Nyman.

Central Asian studies

Through her involvement with the World League of Tatars, she has produced the following books:
Yirmi Birinci Yüzyılda İdil-Ural, and Ağır Gökyüzünde Kanat Çırpmak: Sovyet-sonrası Türk Cumhuriyetlerinde Kültürel Kimlik Arayışı ve Müzakeresi

Creative writings

Her short story "Leda and the Swan," published in Cultural Horizons can be found at the web site entitled "Contemporary Turkish Literature" of Boğaziçi University.

Other works

In addition to the books above, she has written numerous encyclopedia articles and essays in books and journals published in the USA, The Netherlands, Germany, The Russian Federation, Japan, India, and Turkey.