Research 

My first book project engages the concept of Heimat, home(land), from new angles. Over its long and fraught history, this (to many scholars) “quintessentially German” concept has prominently acquired autochthonous, politically regressive significations. I trace, however, how these static and exclusionary implications shift in the deployments of Heimat by German Orientalists, German-Jewish émigrés in Istanbul, and contemporary writers of migration. The scope of my research thus cuts across periods, locales, and genres. In comparative and interdisciplinary configurations, I investigate new articulations of Heimat in Friedrich Schlegel, Goethe, Leo Spitzer, Meral Kureyshi, Mehrnousch Zaeri-Esfahani, and Fatih Akın. In my reformulation of Heimat from these readings, I demonstrate the indispensable role of cross-cultural engagements and the integral function of the so-called East in constructing Heimat and German identities. In this way, my work re-envisions the heritages of our field to flesh out a complex nexus of multilingual, transcultural, and intergenre literary engagements. In conceptualizing this new paradigm of Heimat, I rethink paradigms from postcolonial, trauma, and diaspora studies.

• Kahveci, Varol. "Homes in Crisis: Exploring Narratives of Loss and Homelessness in Leo Spitzer’s 'En Apprenant le Turc' [Heimat zwischen Berlin und Istanbul: Exil, Verlust und Heimlosigkeit in Leo Spitzers 'En Apprenant le Turc']." Monatshefte 117, 2 (2025).

Abstract: In this article, I propose a reconsideration of the German concept of home in transnational and translational contexts. I centralize Leo Spitzer’s essay “En Apprenant le Turc” and its Turkish translation, “Türkçeyi Öğrenirken,” which details his endeavors to learn Turkish and the various lingual and socio-cultural encounters made in the exilic context of Istanbul in the early 20th century. Navigating theories of translation as developed by Benjamin and Venuti and tracing translational discrepancies between the French and Turkish texts, I explore an alternative discourse of Heimat that allows to rethink this term beyond its conventional and conceptual strictures. I argue that Heimat emerges as a multivectoral and multidirectional concept and intersects with various geographies, languages, and histories. By placing Heimat within a new frame of reference, I demonstrate how this notion demands to be regarded through new vectors: (although seemingly counterintuitively) Turkish nationalism, for one, which appears extraneous, but holds, in point of fact, considerable significance.

Forthcoming

• Kahveci, Varol. “My dear Lord, in the name of the secrets of Turkish life, who knows what we are to see!” (Ottoman) Turkish Encounter with the German-Speaking World in the Early 20th Century and an Affective Rethinking of Occidentalism, Middle Eastern Literatures.

Abstract: In this article, I propose a reconsideration of the concept of Occidentalism. In questioning whether we can conceive Occidentalism differently, apart from the Orientalist logic that has been perpetuated in existing studies of Occidentalism, I posit the study of affect as an alternative for postcolonial criticism, which continues to dominate not only the discourse of Occidentalism, in general, but also the analyses of (Ottoman) Turkish engagement with the West and its long history of modernization. Centralizing Cenap Şahâbeddin’s European Letters, I argue that Şahâbeddin’s encounter with the West, when regarded through the question of affect and embodiment, beyond staging a reverse mode of Orientalism, destabilizes antagonistic discourses and paradigms of Orientalism and Occidentalism. Rather than staging hierarchical and dichotomic structures of power, the textual deployments of the body develop entangled histories and identify new sites of signification between East and West, and between the Self and its alleged Other.