Mehmet Dosemeci
INTERACT Postdoctoral Fellow 2011-2012

Mehmet Dosemeci received his PH.D. in History from Columbia University in 2009.  Before joining ICLS as an Interact Fellow, he spent a year as a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy.  His overall work engages with the intellectual and cultural history of Turkish-European relations in the twentieth century.  His current book project, Joining Europe: Civilization and Nationalism in Turkish-EEC Relations, examines how Turkey’s half-century long membership bid into the European Union transformed Turkey’s understanding of itself and its place within the world.  Going beyond the diplomatic and political accounts of Turkish-EU relations, it traces the existential grip that the European project held over the Turkish social-imaginary.  

As a visiting assistant professor at Bowdoin College and Columbia University, Mehmet has taught courses on a variety of topics including European intellectual history, global social movements, and the national imagination.  He is currently teaching:

CPLS V3690: Radical Democracy: From the Jacobins to Tahrir Square3 pts.
M. Dosemeci. TuTh 2:40pm-3:55pm. 516 Hamilton.

This course examines the global history of radical democracy from the French Revolution to the present. Our task is to trace the various attempts to practice democracy that lie outside of the liberal representative model. Spanning the political spectrum, we will investigate everything from democratic armies and factories, anarchist pirate utopias, to claims by many Germans that Nazi Germany "felt more democratic" than its predecessor the Weimar Republic. What sense are we to make of these exceptions to liberal representative democracy? We will ask what these radical ways of organizing and instituting society offer us and question why and how the liberal model has come to hegemonize our conception of democracy today

Ph.d. History, Columbia University (2009)
B.A. History, UC Berkeley (2001)
B.A. Economics, UC Berkeley (2001)

Chunjie Zhang
INTERACT Postdoctoral Fellow 2010-2011 

Chunjie Zhang earned her Ph.D. from Duke University in 2010. The core trajectory of her intellectual pursuits has been exploring global perspectives in the study of literature, culture, and their historical and social context. Engaging with contemporary postcolonial theory, her current book project, Views from the Other Side: Colonial Culture and Anti-Colonial Sentiment in Germany around 1800, explores representations of non-European cultures in German discourse around 1800. Looking at a broad range of texts from Georg Forster's travel narrative to August von Kotzebue's popular dramas to Johann Gottfried Herder's philosophy of history, she acknowledges both Eurocentrism and anticolonial critique in the German discourse and stresses the impact of cultural otherness on the architecture of German thought through sentimentalism in the global eighteenth century. Currently, she is also working on transnational melodramas and the German Tibet expedition of 1938-1939.  

For more information please visit Chunjie Zhang's website.

Spring 2011, Dr. Zhang will be teaching CPLS V3947: Translational Melodrama, Tuesdays 11am-12:50pm. 

Our common understanding of melodrama refers to a set of subgenres that remain close to the heart and hearth and feature a heightened emotionalism and moral contrast. This melodramatic, or excessive, narrative and imagination has also been a prevalent mode dealing with intercultural clashes and historical conflict. This course explores melodramatic imaginations in literature, film, and drama mainly at three historical and geopolitical moments: the eighteenth century, the interwar period, and the present global era. The goal of this course is to investigate the history and imagination of global interrelations through melodramatic representation and inquiry in Chinese, European, and American literature and culture. In the end, we aim to develop a critical understanding of race, gender, immigration, and border thinking in our globalized world. Course materials range from Chinese Ming drama in the 16th century to present-day popular film Farewell, my Concubine, from Friedrich Schiller's theory of drama to Puccini's Madame Butterfly, from Turkish-German film Head On to Chinese American novel American Knees.[Link to registrar listing]