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

Merve's work lies at the intersection of comparative literature and environmental humanities, asking how speculative fiction, film, and visual arts from Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA) and their diasporas imagine futures otherwise. She treats speculative fiction (SF) not as a genre but as a method. Whereas dominant futurist discourses lean on technological fixes, SF offers worldbuilding as a space of experimentation and ecological inquiry: a situated, justice-oriented, critical toolbox for imagining otherwise. Drawing on Arabic, English, French, and Turkish sources, she examines how writers and artists construct counter-futures in response to climate change, extractivism, and the violence of urban development projects.

The politics of futurity lies at the center of her work as she questions who gets to imagine the future, and on whose terms. Merve theorizes Arabfuturism and Gulf futurism as contested aesthetic and political formations that stage a fundamental tension between hegemonic visions of the future (top-down, technofuturist, colonial, profit-driven) and counter-hegemonic ones (grassroots, ecological, embodied, community- and justice-driven). Her work also traces how SWANA creatives mobilize mythmaking, historical repair, aesthetics of embodiment, and feminist ethics of care as counter-futuring methods to challenge colonial legacies, techno-optimist futures, and universalizing narratives of the Anthropocene.

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