Veli N. Yashin is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. He holds a PhD in Arabic and Comparative Literature from Columbia University, and he is the winner of the 2013 Horst Frenz Prize of the American Comparative Literature Association. Yashin's work focuses on modern Arabic and Turkish literatures and more broadly engages the theoretical implications of the complex entanglement between cultural and political representation. His current book project, tentatively titled Disorienting Figures: The Rhetoric of Sovereignty between the Arab and the Turk, broaches these questions by implicating recent theoretical discussions on the concept of sovereignty with theories of authorship and authority and by attending to the emergence of modern prose in Arabic and Turkish in its relation to the transformations of political authority in the late-Ottoman Empire. Reading a series of literary, historical, and political nineteenth- and twentieth century texts published in Arabic and Turkish, among other languages, he claims that the divided and divisive figures of the sultan and the author that populate these texts testify to the contradictions and tensions of sovereignty in this period. Juxtaposing (de)formations of sovereign bodies with contemporary (de)constructions of authorial bodies, he argues that certain theological and political aspects associated with the sultan’s body henceforth come to be taken up by the body of the author. His research and teaching interests include the post-Ottoman world; the relationship between area studies and literary scholarship; conceptions of authority and sovereignty; legacies of German romanticism; histories and future(s) of philology; and Mediterranean studies.

Literature

Arab Studies

Comparative

Nationalism

Theory

Turkish Studies

Ottoman Empire

Arab States

Turkey

Europe

Rhetoric & Literary Studies

Political Theology

Sovereignty

Arabic (fluent)

English (fluent)

German (fluent)

Hebrew (advanced)

Spanish (intermediate)

Turkish (native)

French (elementary)