Affiliation: University of Bologna, Italy
Keywords: comparative literature, literary theory, narratology, digital humanities
Website: https://www.unibo.it/sitoweb/ozen.dolcerocca/en
ORCID: 0000-0001-7022-995X
Full Profile
Ö.N. Dolcerocca is an Associate Professor of Literature at the University of Bologna. She received her doctoral degree with distinction in Comparative Literature from New York University in 2016. Her research focuses on literary theory, comparative literature, modernism, nineteenth-century cultural history, narratology, and digital humanities. She is the primary investigator of the ERC project “Modernizing Empires: Enlightenment, Nationalist Vanguards and Non-Western Literary Modernities” (NONWESTLIT). The project is a comparative study of cultural reforms, linguistic renewal and literary renaissance movements in three imperial traditions, caught between the East-West divide: Russia, Turkey and Japan. It looks at the negotiated cultural models in modernization and westernization processes and argues that their shared historical experience resulted in a common intellectual vocabulary and narrative models shared by otherwise extremely diverse cultures. The project aims to develop a comparative model, drawing a polycentric and plural map of literary modernity. In three subprojects, this project investigates structural similarities in 1.Questions and concepts in literary criticism; 2.Translational practices and translated works from Europe, and 3.Narrative logic and typologies in fiction. It is the first comparative multilingual study of the non-Western literary modernities to bring these specific traditions together. It contests Eurocentric models of literary history which interprets these cases as failures or late emulations. It challenges an overemphasis on single national traditions or on postcolonial approaches, and limited body of studied texts and analysis techniques in the study of the non-West. The project follows a multi-method research strategy to conduct historical and literary comparisons between the emerging national literary systems, combining qualitative and quantitative methods in order to map transnational networks of narrative strategies, conceptual systems and translation practices. It brings new directions in Digital Humanities, expanding it to non-Western and multilingual comparative research. Finally, it makes a much-needed contribution to the current literary corpus by making unknown and untranslated texts available and accessible.
Dolcerocca completed her higher education in Istanbul, Marburg, Paris and New York. She widely published scholarly articles and book chapters on Comparative literature. Her masters thesis “Self and Desire in the Modern Turkish Novel” was published as a book in 2012. She is the guest editor of the special issue entitled “Beyond World Literature: Reading Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar Today,” which appeared in the journal of Middle Eastern Literatures. The issue offers new ways to read Turkish literature, beyond its common perception as the phantasmic union of ‘East’ and ‘West.’ Her articles “Free Spirited Clocks: Tanpınar’s Modernism and Time Regulation Institute,” and “Chronometrics in the Modern Metropolis: The City, the Past and Collective Memory in A.H. Tanpınar,” both mark out a transnational comparativism that contribute to the current debates on comparative methodologies and modernist studies. Her most recent publications include commissioned chapters on the nineteenth-century Ottoman Literature by Oxford University Press and I.B. Tauris. She is currently working on her book manuscript on the development of modernist fiction in Turkey in a comparative perspective.
Dolcerocca currently serves as an executive council member in the MLA West Asian Literatures Forum and as the chair of the ACLA Owen Aldridge Prize Committee. In her academic service, she is interested in promoting humanities and liberal arts in higher education, addressing the particular problems the humanities face today, and strengthening interdisciplinary relations between science and humanities.