This presentation will explore two research questions on the study of Halide Edip's work: a. current state of archival work on Halide Edip Adivar. This will entail an overview of digital and print archives and the question of how we can verify archival material as it pertains to the writer's corpus. I will be using a recent musical piece "Turk Kizlar Marsi" signed by H. Edibe, as an example to open the floor for discussion on methods of verification or elimination of authorship. b. the second part of the presentation will extend the question to new critical, theoretical frontiers and ask how we can read Halide Edip's work under new theoretical lenses. In this section, I will share my emerging research on animal studies in Halide Edip's fiction and argue that animals in Halide Edip's fiction are not a backdrop, nor are they mere symbolic details. As we see in "Murder at Yolpalas" and "Caresaz" there is an inherent pro-animal and animal rights sentiment that pervades her stories. I will briefly discuss the theological, humanist, and urban reasons behind human-animal interactions in her fiction. However, I will ultimately veer the question to application of and exploration of new theoretical lenses and ask if we read Halide Edip's engagement with the question of animal rights within the existing theoretical framework of east/west; tradition/modernity; old/new, and apply these discourses in our analysis of animal rights in her fiction, or if we have to step out of existing and familiar critical lenses to explore Halide Edip under a new light.

The fact that Halide Edib Adıvar is most generally studied as one of the key figures of Turkish nationalism, feminism and of modernity in Turkey and the wider Middle East (as argued, for example, in Marilyn Booth’s May Her Likes Be Multiplied) overshadows her literary contributions to the development of the realist- psychological novel in Turkey. This presentation will try to address that gap and examine Halide Edib’s contribution to the development of the realist novel and of realism in Turkish literature as the very vehicle of her success as an ideologue. Halide Edib’s later friend and literary interlocuter Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu, writing about her first two novels in the progressive journal Tanin, observed that Halide Edib “introduced a new and original imaginative climate which aimed at capturing reality while also idealizing it.” The coupling of the “real” and “ideal” may be construed as contradictory. I argue that what Yakup Kadri was referring to is Halide Edib’s creation of an everyday reality through a minutia of detail about locations, characters and events while creating characters that embody and actively articulate certain idealized positions on the subjects of modernity (East vs. West divide); women’s role in society; the place of religion in social life, and on nationalism. These characters standing for specific and opposing ideals are depicted as individuals with psychological depth, whose often overflowing emotions reflect their inner conflicts and, more importantly, their conscience. While Adıvar's concrete details (as argued by Barthes’ in L’effect de Reel) create the mimesis of social life, it’s the emotional excess and accessibility of her characters that create an internal depth to them, fostering identification. There’s also the appealing sense of growth depicted by the characters’ search for a synthesis that can be applied to the larger community they’re part of. I will examine the development of these techniques in Halide Edib’s Sinekli Bakkal, Vurun Kahpeye, Ateşten Gömlek, Kalp Ağrısı and Zeyno’nun Oğlu. While examining the ways she was able to effectively represent her ideological positions through a dialectical process leading to a synthesis, I will also interrogate if the ideals Adıvar presented, the positions she took, stand the test of time in our current moment vis-à-vis her nationalism amidst the accusations of her betrayal of the Armenians and Kurds; her feminism with her exclusive attention on elite extraordinary women; and her approach to religion both as an individual right and spiritual expression.

Halide Edib Adivar's 1935 Journey to India: Insights from "Inside India" and "Conflict of East and West in Turkey" The focus of this presentation is Halide Edib Adivar's 1935 trip to pre-partition colonial India. Through a critical analysis of her travel narrative, Inside India, published in 1937, and the eight lectures she delivered at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, during January and February of 1935, later published under the title Conflict of East and West in Turkey (1935), readers gain new insights about this controversial author. As an educator, novelist, philosopher, and journalist, Adivar (1884-1964) played a crucial role in shaping the discourse around societal issues in the late Ottoman Empire and the emerging Republic. During her trip, Adivar encountered prominent figures such as Gandhi and Dürrüşehvar Sultan, the daughter of Sultan Abdulmejid II, whose entire extended family had been sent into exile by the Republican government. Her visits to important pilgrimage sites and historic buildings as well as beautiful gardens, Adivar’s stays in Muslim households where one generation observed purdah while the younger generation of women participated in public life reveal criticisms of policies followed in Turkey. Such reflections and any parallels she drew between Turkey and India regarding questions of interactions with the West, nationalism, and cultural identity, more than a decade after the establishment of the Republic of Turkey and as many years after she had been in self-imposed exile, provide readers with fresh insights into Adivar's perspectives.

In this presentation, I will highlight various phases of Halide Edib's oeuvre (starting with Raik'in Annesi, Seviye Talip and Handan) leading to more mature works, such as Ateşten Gömlek, Vurun Kahpeye, Kalb Ağrısı among others and finally reflect upon the works in the post-1930s (e.g. Yolpalas Cinayeti). I will analyze the innovate nature of Halide Edib's style, her experiments with form, her political criticism in the interwar period and her feminist agenda.

This presentation will examine Halide Edib's contrasting narratives of neurasthenia, "an illness of civilization and modern liberty," in her autobiography Memoirs of Halidé Edib Adıvar (1926) and novel Kalp Ağrısı (1924, Heartache). By focusing on her immediate experience and familiarity with neurasthenia, which is an overlooked chapter in her life story, I offer two overlapping reasons to explain the appeal of this fashionable disease to Edib, who fictionalized it in her novel Kalp Ağrısı. First of all, neurasthenia emerges as a fitting affliction to plague the New Woman, who in turn grapples with it on her journey toward resolving her moral dilemmas and attaining emotional maturation; Edib employs neurasthenia as a trope to delineate her model of the New Turkish Woman. Second, Edib penned and published her autobiography in English in London, where neurasthenia enjoyed its belle epoque at the time. Through this specific illness narrative, Edib situates herself and her fiction within a Western temporal, geographical, and medical context, making her narrative relevant as she forges a connection between herself, a non-Western Muslim woman from Turkey, and her contemporaries in the West. Lastly, I argue that Edib portrays neurasthenia as a defining category that highlights the racial division in the official narrative of civilization, which was also distinctly gendered, emphasizing the cultivation of emotional etiquette (hissi terbiye) and self-discipline for the New Turkish women.