Kadir Has University Core Program (Co-Course Department) is growing with the addition of new names. We are happy to introduce our new colleagues to you.
Akın Sefer completed his undergraduate education at Boğaziçi University, Department of Political Science and International Relations, then received his MA in Modern Turkish History from the Atatürk Institute, affiliated with the same university, and his PhD in the History Department at Northeastern University in 2018. In his doctoral dissertation, he examined the formation of the working class in the context of industrialization and reform processes at Tersane-i Amire in the nineteenth century. Between 2018 and 2021, as a postdoctoral researcher within the scope of an ERC project (UrbanOccupations OETR) carried out at Koç University, he worked on nineteenth-century Ottoman population registers and their mapping via GIS.
Since 2021, Dr. Sefer has been the director of a TÜBİTAK-1001 project titled “Shipbuilding and Labor Migration in the Black Sea Coast and Istanbul, 1827-1878”. His research and publications focus on modernization, labor, migration, and maritime history in the late Ottoman Empire.
Dr. Deniz Gündoğan İbrişim works at the intersection of trauma and memory studies, gender studies, comparative literature, ecocriticism and environmental humanities. Her research interests include climate trauma, solastalgia, extractivism and environmental justice. Her work focuses on racial, social and environmental justice, transcultural trauma, and representations of memory and responsibility in the Anthropocene in contemporary art and literature within the context of the Middle East, Africa and the Anglophone diasporas.
Gündoğan İbrişim, who completed her PhD in Comparative Literature at the University of Washington as a Fulbright scholar, taught courses in Comparative Literature and World Literature, Global Studies and Area Studies, and Academic Writing at the same institution. Before joining Kadir Has University, she worked as a senior lecturer at the School of Foreign Languages at Istanbul Technical University. Between 2021-2023, she conducted the project “Postimperial Memories, Gender and Trauma in the Anthropocene: A Change of Feminist Perspective on Turkey” as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Researcher at the SU Gender Center of Sabancı University. Gündoğan İbrişim is the author of Gaflet: Modern Turkish Literature’s Cinsel Sinir Uçları (Metis, 2019, with Sema Kaygusuz). She is currently working on her book Toward a Slow Witnessing in World Literature: Thinking and Surviving with the Earth, to be published by Routledge Publishing.
Enes Akdağ received his BA from İstanbul Şehir University, Political Science and International Relations (English) program in 2017. He completed the Cinema and Television (English) Double Major program at the same institution in 2020. During his undergraduate years, he worked in various positions in advertising and TV series production companies. Between 2017 and 2019, he wrote and directed a total of five short films, two of which were awarded the Short Film Production Support of the General Directorate of Cinema of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism of the Republic of Turkey. In 2022, he graduated from Galatasaray University, Media and Communication Studies MA Program with his thesis titled “Current Aspects of Mass Viewing Experience: Subscription-Based Video-on-Demand Broadcasting Platforms and Online Viewing Parties”. He is continuing his PhD education at Kadir Has University, Communication Sciences PhD Program. As part of his PhD thesis research, he focuses on the daily life interactions and economic-political aspects of the changing viewing culture in Kadıköy, a former summer resort.
Her current research interests include film design, new cinema history, queer cinema, digital ethnography, media archaeology, and children and media. Adopting qualitative research methods, Akdağ’s research has been published in many prestigious educational institutions ranging from the University of Birmingham (UK) to the University of Melbourne (Australia).
Nora Tataryan completed her PhD in Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Toronto, her MA in Cultural Studies at Sabancı University (Istanbul), and her BA in Philosophy at Galatasaray University (Istanbul) and Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (Paris). Tataryan, who is a visiting researcher at the University of Cambridge in 2022, is working on theoretical expansions of looking at state violence through the possibilities of art and fiction, based on her PhD thesis titled “Between Reality and Fiction: An Aesthetic Perspective on the Legacy of Disaster in Turkey.” Tataryan, who has presented her research at national and international conferences and published in academic and non-academic journals and books, has areas of interest including aesthetic theory, collective memory, genocide studies, feminist philosophy, and psychoanalysis.
Tataryan, who continues her production in the field of contemporary art in addition to her academic studies, has worked as a researcher and collaborated in art institutions such as Arter, Salt and the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts. Tataryan, who has written literary and contemporary art critiques, blog posts and fictional texts in various media throughout her career, served as the executive editor of the journal Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, and Technoscience between 2018-2020.
Dr. Onur Pusuluk started his academic career at Istanbul Technical University by completing a double major in Molecular Biology and Genetics and Physics departments. His undergraduate thesis studies were on neuro-immunological interactions and the evolution of the genetic code at the intersection of physics and biology, respectively. He completed his PhD in the Physics department at the same university, where he also worked as a research assistant. In his thesis study, he investigated quantum correlations established through hydrogen bonds in biochemical molecules and the role of these correlations in enzyme catalysis. As part of this study, he spent one year of his PhD in the Frontiers of Quantum Physics group at Oxford University. He continued his post-doctoral academic life at Koç University as a member of the QuEST (Quantum Enabling System Technologies) team. He has been conducting an independent research project and group at the same university for the last three years.
Dr. Pusuluk joined the KHAS Joint Courses and Molecular Biology and Genetics departments as a Visiting Professor. His theoretical studies, which focus on the intersection of quantum information, quantum thermodynamics and quantum biology, also utilize computational methods such as quantum chemistry, artificial neural networks and tensor networks. Here, together with the qDISCorD (q-Delocalized Information Systems Correlated Dynamics) team he will establish, he aims to shed light on complex phenomena such as life, energy and time from the conceptual and theoretical framework of the second quantum revolution.
Dr. Tuna Pesen received his BSc degree from Boğaziçi University Physics Department in 2014, his MSc degree in 2016, and his PhD degree in 2022. Dr. Pesen completed his master’s degree in theoretical cosmology and continued his research in experimental biophysics during his doctoral education.
He completed his doctoral studies in the fields of developing a non-invasive diagnostic method for endometriosis using Raman spectroscopy and machine learning and examining the effects of radiotherapy doses on the mechanical properties of red blood cells with optical tweezers. Dr. Tuna Pesen, who continues to investigate the universal behaviors of the cytoskeleton under mechanical effects, continues his studies in the field of modeling these characteristic behaviors with simulation.
Zeynep Tunay Gül received her BA degree from the Department of Foreign Language Education, English Language Teaching Program at Middle East Technical University and her MA degree in Adult Education at Marmara University. She is currently at the doctoral dissertation stage at Yıldız Technical University, Department of Educational Sciences.
Her main areas of expertise are adult education, volunteering, instructional design, motivation and conscious awareness for adults. By volunteering at İLKYAR, she contributes to the activities of this foundation, which aims to create opportunities for students in rural and underdeveloped areas (especially in boarding schools) to continue their education. In addition, she is a volunteer member for children under state protection within the Children’s Houses Coordination Center (ÇEKOM), which operates under the roof of the Family, Labor and Social Services Directorate.