Burcu Alkan

I was in Manchester first as a postgraduate student. I received my PhD in English and American Studies in 2009 under the supervision of Terry Eagleton and Howard Booth. My thesis, “Representation of the Intellectual in the Modern Turkish Novel of the 1970s” was later published in Germany under the title Promethean Encounters. After holding lectureship and research posts in Turkey and Germany, I returned to Manchester in 2020.

My earlier work focuses on the concept of the intellectual from cultural materialist and postcolonial perspectives. This trajectory later branched out to include Faustian narratives and their demonic, magical world of the self and the soul. Meanwhile, the psychoanalytical elements of my research culminated in a greater curiosity about mental pathologies. Currently, I am working in the field of medical humanities with a broad interest in the relationship between literature and the mind (sciences & pathologies) and selfhood.