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.
Selfies were Silvana's process of surviving disease
Remembering my dear friend and collaborator whose creativity found new outlet as she faced her altered states of beauty. A fierce and bountiful soul, Silvana is greatly missed.
