Ebru Esma Yağız
Home Department: English
Ebru Esma Yağız is a PhD student in Comparative Literary Studies at Northwestern University with a home department in English, and a Mellon Cluster Fellow in Middle Eastern and North African Studies. She holds an MA in Comparative Literature from Koç University (2025) and a double BA in Psychology and Western Languages and Literatures from Boğaziçi University (2023).
Her research interests include the global nineteenth-century, science studies, Bildungsroman and lyrical poetry in English and Turkish literatures. Drawing from her interdisciplinary formation, the core of her research interests concerns how selfhood and meaning survive and reconstitute themselves under epistemic dissolution, bodily transformation, and psychological precarity. To explore these themes, she positions psychology and science both as interpretive tools (utilising affect, phenomenology, and psychoanalysis) and also as objects of critical inquiry (science as a product of intellectual history) in their own right. In her doctoral work, she plans to specialise in the long nineteenth-century Ottoman Turkish and Anglophone literatures, examining how scientific and literary discourses mutually constitute one another across imperial and cultural boundaries and generate distinct accounts of embodiment, selfhood, and modernity.
Alongside her scholarly work, Ebru co-founded Dantel, a virtual poetry reading community focused mainly on modern Turkish poetry, and she volunteers as a Copy Editor for Nesir: Journal of Literary Studies.
Her research interests include the global nineteenth-century, science studies, Bildungsroman and lyrical poetry in English and Turkish literatures. Drawing from her interdisciplinary formation, the core of her research interests concerns how selfhood and meaning survive and reconstitute themselves under epistemic dissolution, bodily transformation, and psychological precarity. To explore these themes, she positions psychology and science both as interpretive tools (utilising affect, phenomenology, and psychoanalysis) and also as objects of critical inquiry (science as a product of intellectual history) in their own right. In her doctoral work, she plans to specialise in the long nineteenth-century Ottoman Turkish and Anglophone literatures, examining how scientific and literary discourses mutually constitute one another across imperial and cultural boundaries and generate distinct accounts of embodiment, selfhood, and modernity.
Alongside her scholarly work, Ebru co-founded Dantel, a virtual poetry reading community focused mainly on modern Turkish poetry, and she volunteers as a Copy Editor for Nesir: Journal of Literary Studies.