Merve Tabur is a lecturer in Comparative Literature at Utrecht University and a researcher at CoFutures.

Merve is a scholar of comparative literature and environmental humanities whose research examines representations of environmental destruction in speculative fiction, film, and the visual arts from Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA). She works with Arabic, Turkish, and Anglophone sources that tackle issues such as climate change, extractivism, extinction, and environmental justice. Her research critically engages with the discourse of the Anthropocene and demonstrates how cultural production in SWANA challenges and redefines universalist conceptualizations of the term. Her current book project examines conceptions of futurity and environmental justice in SWANA from a comparative perspective. 

Merve has received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Penn State University, where she has taught comparative literature, world literature, English composition, and Arabic language courses. Before joining Utrecht University, she was a postdoctoral researcher in the European Research Council-funded CoFutures project (Department of Culture, Religion, Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Oslo). She is a co-creator of the "Unraveling the Anthropocene: Race, Environment, and Pandemic" podcast series, run by the Liberal Arts Collective at Penn State. Merve has also translated academic books and articles on topics such as gender politics, cultural history, and literary theory. 

Personal website: https://mervetabur.com/

Education

Ph.D.  Pennsylvania State University, Comparative Literature

MA  Dartmouth College, Comparative Literature

MA  Bogaziçi University, History

BA  Bogaziçi University, Sociology and History

Select translations