New peer-reviewed research on Expat Harem is published
My book is 20 years old and currently undergoing a "renaissance" in academic circles. It looks to remain the gold standard for Turkish expat memoirs.
It’s always a thrill to learn that someone has spent time with something I created, let alone adding it to the body of their own scholarship with a cool tag like #imagology.
I just noticed a new academic research article on the anthology I co-edited more than twenty years ago. A peer-reviewed paper Translating Türkiye’s women in a transnational context: the case of Tales from the Expat Harem by Hilal Erkazanci Durmus, an Associate Professor of Translation Studies at Hacettepe University in Ankara, has been published in the Translation Studies Journal this spring, March 2026.
Her article examines Tales from the Expat Harem from a translation studies perspective, as a cultural product moving within a social network.
Professor Durmus examines the book through the lens of translation sociology, an investigation into translation as a social practice. It looks at the “agents" involved—translators and editors acting as active mediators and cross-cultural agents—and how our choices were shaped by the institutions, publishing demands, and power dynamics of the time.
The study examines how the authors "translate" Turkish culture and women’s roles for a global audience.
Her research explores the social, economic, and political factors that influence how stories like these are produced, distributed, and received. It’s a deep dive into how translations impact the global circulation of ideas, especially when moving between major languages and cultures.
Professor Durmus teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on translation sociology and discourse, and her paper is tagged with some fascinating identifiers: cultural translation, feminist translation, imagology, migrant women (the "expats," in academic terms), and Türkiye.
It begins: Family of Mine research blog
Earlier this month I opened another blog channel here on my site. You can access it from the menu at the top of this page. It will focus solely on a new project I’m calling Family of Mine, and share pieces of that investigation.
I inherited a mystery. This is not a story that was passed down.
First post off my own site about this project, at LinkedIn.. Milestone! Anyway, I post it here too on my own blog because the fact of the matter is, something new is starting here, in a different blog on the same site.
The past few years I’ve been on a trail that started with some old family photos and interviews.
It grew into the research behind my new book-in-progress, Family of Mine, and led me into government archives, genealogy records, and parts of history I hadn’t expected to encounter.
If you enjoy family history or the research side of storytelling, you might like it.
Is your foot on the brake at the same time you're trying to accelerate? It’s your brain science
New read for Fogust...
I was fortunate to read an early manuscript of this new book release by ☀️ Jessica J.J. Lutz ☀️ and look forward to diving into the final version now making its way around the world!
I see Barbie gets a mention on p 110 - she was Jessica's favored doll because she wasn't a baby, she was a grown woman who knew what she wanted - Jessica and I were among the (how many, uncounted?) girls whose parents wouldn't allow us to play with the toy. Before Barbie director Greta Gerwig was even born, Barbie was a subversive force in our lives!
“A war correspondent facing burnout wonders why she suddenly feels fear when a bomb goes off at her Baghdad hotel: a clue comes when she realizes she is 4 months pregnant. To understand how her coping mechanisms no longer work, she applied her journalistic research skills to the inner conflict she experienced, and her upbringing. What comes out of it is a deep dive into the gender-based sociology, and the brain science, a review of the literature parsing it all, and a way forward, through simple exercises that anyone can do to start using our dual-sided human brain to succeed in life and work, and stay healthy and feel good about it too.”
Here’s where you can get the book in the USA: Amazon.
If I were writing the book on 2020, this would be the BLUF
This is how a book written by the ‘generative journalism” account/“knowledge service in an infodemic” I contribute to would start. I believe that’s called BLUF: bottom line, up front.
What would the first sentence of YOUR book on 2020 be?
Today's bookshelf
Our bookshelf of tomes about this dark chapter in American political history keeps growing…
“Age Of Lies. Rigged. Cold War. Hot Peace. Dirty Money. Unfreedom. Shadow State. Red Notice. Stable Genius. Untold Story. Putin’s People. Crime In Progress. Secret Meetings. Dark Towers. Trail Of Destruction. Age of Trump.”
We’ll keep adding to it until this chapter of history is fully written & in the dustbin.
Here’s to the heroes among us who are going to bring us through.
TBT, to the book launch of The Season Of The Witch
This was a fun night with Fast Company journalist EB Liza Boyd at the Elks Club for Salon founder David Talbot.
His book "chronicles the cultural history of San Francisco and from the late 1960s to the early 1980s when figures such as Harvey Milk, Janis Joplin, Jim Jones, and Bill Walsh helped usher it from backwater city to thriving metropolis."
Retrospective: Elif Shafak calls my Expat Harem a best book on Turkey
Thanks, Elif! (She also wrote the forward to it, back in 2005. We connected early -- as sisters in Turkish culture, and Western culture through it, and fellow writers and speakers.)
Students who hate reading were the first to finish my book? What!? TBT.
Thanks for sharing this, Gul Celkan. (She's an English and women's studies instructor at Eastern Mediterranean University in Northern Cyprus.)