Dr Demet Karabulut Dede is a member of the English Department as a Fulbright visiting scholar. She specializes in literary modernism and works at the intersection of modernist and spatial studies, with a particular focus on alternative modernities. She is also interested in theatrical performances and their role in transforming gender roles, and cultural and spatial heritages in Turkey.

Dr Karabulut Dede’s first book project is Modernist Continuities: Virginia Woolf and Women in Turkey. This edited collection includes papers that engage with Virginia Woolf’s reception by women writers in Turkey, literary networks built between Woolf’s works, and her influence on the women’s movement in Turkey. The book forms a picture of how Woolf’s writing has served as an inspiration for women in Turkey and it will be published by Bloomsbury Publishing in 2024.

Her current book project, Imperial Encounters: The Ottoman and Byzantine Empires in Modernist Writing is a monograph that examines how ideas of the Orient shaped British understanding of modernity by looking at the use of the Byzantine Empire and the Ottoman Empire in a broad range of texts. The project examines W. B. Yeats, Roger Fry and Clive Bell in terms of their literary and artistic connection to Byzantine art in forming their creative and critical works, and explores Virginia Woolf, Grace Ellison and Vita Sackville-West as writers who deal with the daily life in the Ottoman Empire, and women’s role in it to resist previous preoccupations and patriarchal conceptions. The project aims to demonstrate how the East transforms into a flexible concept for the modernists and how it is used to reflect plural understandings of modernisms.

Other pieces out or forthcoming include work on Virginia Woolf, William Golding, Dorothy Richardson, Arnold Bennett, Refik Halid Karay and Orhan Pamuk. As the founder of Virginia Woolf Society Turkey, Dr Karabulut Dede organizes “Woolf Seminar” series which feature a Woolfian scholar each month. The Society organizes other programs on Virginia Woolf, modernism and modernist Turkish literature.

From 2020-2021 Dr Karabulut Dede was a TÜBİTAK postdoctoral fellow in the English Department at the University of Exeter. She also taught in the English Department at Munzur University, Turkey, and in the American Culture and Literature Department at Haliç University, Turkey. She earned her PhD in English Language and Literature from Ankara University, Turkey.