Hill to Present “Turkey - Land of Symbols?”
Dr. Mary Louise Hill, assistant professor and acting chair of humanities, will present “Turkey – Land of Symbols?” as part of the College Colloquium series on Wednesday, November 7 at 12:30 p.m. in the Alumni Room.
Anticipating the arrival of Turkish novelist and 2006 Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk to Buffalo, Dr. Hill talk about Turkey and the complex geo-political and cultural identity that it struggles with, which are central to an understanding of Pamuk’s novel Snow.
Hill’s presentation will be based on the content of Snow, but it will also draw in large part on her experiences while living in Turkey from 1999-2003. Her primary goal is to make the culture,and the content of the book accessible to the American reader who has little experience of Turkish life and literature.
During her time in Turkey, Hill was a faculty member in the Department of American Culture and Literature at Ba?kent University, in Ankara. She experienced the cultural changes that serve as a backdrop for the novel (published in Turkey in 2002). Pamuk’s books provided but one dimension to her study of Turkish society and culture; Hill also researched contemporary Turkish culture and politics, and in particular, how it has been represented by the West.
Some of the ideas from this research appear in the paper “Galata Trip-Tik: The Traveller as Improv-Artist in Modern Turkey”, which she presented at the 2002 Ege University Cultural Studies Symposium; this paper was published in the proceedings from that event. In addition, Dr. Hill participated in several other American/Turkish Language & Literature Conferences, acted as a reader for JAST: The Journal for American Studies in Turkey, and served as English language editor for the proceedings from the OIC-EU Joint Forum: Civilization and Harmony: The Political Dimension,” a dynamic post 9/11 meeting of the Foreign Affairs Ministers in the European Union and Organization of Islamic Countries, which occurred in Istanbul in February 2002.
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