Firat Oruc served as a Mellon Fellow and Visiting Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at UCLA. He earned his Ph.D. in Literature at Duke University, where he was a recipient of the Bass Advanced Instructorship Award. His dissertation, Minor Measures: The Plebeian Aesthetics of World Literature in the Twentieth Century, focuses on a diverse set of creative works from Europe, East and South Asia, the Americas, Middle East, and Africa to investigate modalities of “world writing” in modernist, postcolonial and contemporary transnational literatures. The main ambition of the project is to highlight the capacities of the geoliterary aesthetics in configuring local subjectivities, affiliations and histories in relation to the abstract cartographic totality of global modernity. His publications include a reference article on “The Cultural History of Reading in the Modern Middle East” (in The Cultural History of Reading, eds. Sara Quay and Gabrielle Watling, Greenwood Press, 2008) and a journal essay titled “Agency and Transnational Mediation in the World Literary Space,” forthcoming in English Language Notes. At UCLA, Firat taught courses in world Anglophone literatures, postcolonial theory and comparative global literary studies. Currently, Firat serves in a Postdoctoral position in Comparative Literature at Northwestern University.
