Purple Certificate Project Specialist
Berfin Çiçek was previously an MA student in the Cultural Studies program and a research assistant at the Gender and Women’s Studies Center for Excellence at Sabancı University. She completed her undergraduate studies in Comparative Literature at Koç University with an Honors Thesis titled “Telling the Memories of Massacre: Trauma and Testimony from Dersim’s 38”, which was published by Amsterdam University Press in Conference Proceedings. Her previous presentations and works appeared at organizations such as the American Comparative Literature Association’s Annual Meeting in 2021, Turkologentag European Convention on Turkic, Ottoman and Turkish Studies, Liberal Arts Collective at Penn State, NYU’s creative writing journal, and the British Association for Holocaust Studies. As an output of her MA thesis, her article titled “Metaphors of Mental Unrests: Making Subjectivity and Resistance in Modern Iranian Film and Fiction” was published in Monograf Journal. She is specifically interested in comparative modernisms of Turkish and Iranian literatures. She has been working as a project specialist in the Purple Certificate Program at SU Gender since 2022. Additionally, starting from September 2024, she will begin her Ph.D. studies in the Middle Eastern Studies department at the University of Washington.