Research Bio
Deniz Göktürk earned her Dr.phil. at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany, in 1995, with a dissertation on literary and cinematic imaginations of America in early twentieth-century German culture. She also worked as a certified translator of Turkish for law courts, hospitals and publishers for several years. Her first full-time teaching appointment was at the University of Southampton, UK, in the School of Modern Languages and the Film Program from 1995 to 2001. She joined the Department of German at Berkeley in fall 2001. She has served as graduate adviser and department chair.
She has held awards and grants from the DAAD, the Economic and Social Sciences Research Council (ESRC) in the UK, the Institute for European Studies, the Institute for International Studies, the Townsend Center for the Humanities, the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, and Digital Humanities at Berkeley. She has been an invited fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study Konstanz and the Center for Cinepoetics at the Freie Universität Berlin
On campus, she holds affiliations with the Department of Film and Media, the Berkeley Center for New Media, Digital Humanities, the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, the Center for Race and Gender, the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, and the Program in Critical Theory. She has participated in cross-campus collaborations on “Cultural Forms in Transit” and a strategic working group on “Circulation.” She is co-founder and concept coordinator of TRANSIT, the electronic journal launched by the Berkeley German Department in September 2005.
Her publications include a book on literary and cinematic imaginations of America in early twentieth-century German culture: Künstler, Cowboys, Ingenieure: Kultur- und mediengeschichtliche Studien zu deutschen Amerika-Texten 1912-1920 (1998) as well as numerous articles on migration, culture, and cinema. She is co-editor of The German Cinema Book (2002, 2nd ed. 2020, co-edited with Tim Bergfelder, Erica Carter, and Claudia Sandberg), a special issue of New German Critique 92 (Spring/Summer 2004): Multicultural Germany: Art, Performance and Media (co-edited with Barbara Wolbert). Germany in Transit. Nation and Migration, 1955-2005, a co-edited sourcebook (with David Gramling, and Anton Kaes), was published by University of California Press in 2007. An expanded and updated German edition with the original documents was published in 2011 as Transit Deutschland: Debatten zu Nation und Migration (with David Gramling, Anton Kaes, and Andreas Langenohl). With Levent Soysal and İpek Türeli, she published Orienting Istanbul: Cultural Capital of Europe? (2010), and the Turkish edition İstanbul Nereye? Küresel Kent, Kültür, Avrupa (2011). As a translator from Turkish into German she co-edited an anthology of contemporary Turkish literature, Jedem Wort gehört ein Himmel (1991, with Zafer Senocak), and translated novels by Aras Ören and Bilge Karasu. Göktürk is co-founder of TRANSIT, the electronic journal launched by the Berkeley German Department in September 2005.
Research Expertise and Interest
German literature, German cinema, transnational cinemas, Turkish studies, performance and spectatorship and reception, intertextuality and intermediality and translation, politics and poetics of migration and globalization, urban imaginaries and mediations of place, theories of diversity and nationalism, comedy, comedy and community, modern rituals of regulating identity and authority and mobility