A photo of Yasemin Yildiz

Yasemin Yildiz

Associate Professor

E-mail: yildiz@humnet.ucla.edu Office: Royce Hall 322

Office Hours: By appointment

Fields of interest: Migration;Memory; Multilingualism and Translation; Minority Discourse; 20th & 21st Century German Literature and Culture

Yasemin Yildiz is Associate Professor of German and Comparative Literature at UCLA, where she is also affiliated with the Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies and the Center for European and Russian Studies. Previously, she held a tenured position in German at the University of Illinois and served as a Visiting Associate Professor of German at Harvard University. In 2016, she received the DAAD Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in German and European Studies, awarded by the German Academic Exchange Service and the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies.

Prof. Yildiz’s book, Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012) won the MLA’s Scaglione Prize in Germanic Languages and Literatures in 2012 and received Honorable Mention for the Laura Shannon Prize for Contemporary European Studies in 2014. Beyond the Mother Tongue argues that the multilingual practices in literature, arts, and everyday life that have increasingly come into public and scholarly view since the 1990s cannot be understood without recognition of monolingualism as a historically specific, shaping force that continues to frame and impact those practices to this day. The particular chapters investigate the investments in, engagements with, and attempted resistances to the monolingual paradigm in the multilingual writings of authors ranging from Franz Kafka and Theodor W. Adorno to Yoko Tawada, Emine Sevgi Özdamar, and Feridun Zaimoglu.

Further publications include essays on Holocaust testimonies, Islam and gender in Europe, the literature of Berlin, memory activism, migrant feminism, and literary encodings of racialization as well as translations of Turkish-German literature into English. Together with Bettina Brandt, she has co-edited the volume Tales that Touch: Migration, Translation, and Temporality in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century German Literature and Culture Cultural (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2022), which starts from the insight that texts born of migration defy easy categorization as they cross borders, languages, histories, and media in unpredictable ways. Likewise co-edited with Bettina Brandt, the special issue “Translating Multilingualism” for the journal Studies in 20th and 21st Century Literature (2024) probes the relationship between translation and literary multilingualism.

Currently, Prof. Yildiz is working on the book project Memory Citizenship: Migrant Archives of Holocaust Remembrance, co-authored with Michael Rothberg. This book in progress explores the effect of transnational migration on cultural memory. More specifically, Memory Citizenship assembles and analyzes a wide range of memory work by Germany-based immigrant writers, artists, and activists relating to National Socialism, the Holocaust, and World War II. The interventions of the project lie in offering a new (or newly visible) archive of materials, a recalibrated account of postwar Germany that brings together memory discourses and migration history, and a conceptual rethinking of the relationship of memory and migration more generally. Funding for this project has been provided by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS).

Education

  • Ph.D. in German Studies from Cornell University
  • M.A. in German Literature from the Universität Hamburg
  • Completed graduate coursework in Comparative Literature at the City University of New York on a Fulbright scholarship and attended the School for Criticism and Theory in Ithaca, NY

Research

Prof. Yildiz’s research focuses on twentieth- and twenty-first century literature and culture, with interests in literary multilingualism and translation, migration and transnational studies, minority discourses (especially Turkish-German and German-Jewish), memory studies, gender studies, and Holocaust studies.

Featured Works

Selected Publications

Translations

  • “Aras Ören’s What Does Niyazi Want in Naunyn Street. A Partial Translation with a Translator’s Introduction.” Monatshefte 112.4 (Winter 2020). 659-674.
  • “The Letter in the Suitcase” by Menekşe Toprak. Translation from Turkish with a Translator’s Introduction. Massachusetts Review (Fall 2017). 429-441.

Honors and Awards

  • DAAD Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in German and European Studies
  • Honorable Mention, Laura Shannon Prize for Contemporary European Studies, Nanovic Institute at Notre Dame, for Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition
  • Winner of the 10th Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Studies in Germanic Languages and Literatures, Modern Language Association of America, for Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition
  • IPRH Prize for Research in the Humanities, for the essay “Governing European Subjects: Tolerance and Guilt in the Discourse of ‘Muslim Women,’” Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities, University of Illinois
  • ACLS Collaborative Research Fellowship, American Council of Learned Societies
  • British Council Award, Researcher Exchange Programme (Leeds University)

Selected Essays

  • “Special Focus Introduction: Translating Multilingualism.” Studies in Twentieth & Twenty-First Century Literature 48.1 (2024): 1-9.
  • “Reading Racialization: Yadé Kara’s Selam Berlin.” German Studies Review 46.1 (February 2023). 97-115.
  • “Migrant Spaces.” Routledge Handbook of Memory Activism. Ed. by Yifat Gutman and Jenny Wüstenberg. New York and London: Routledge, 2023. 224-228.
  • “Introduction: Tales that Touch.” With Bettina Brandt. Tales that Touch: Migration, Translation, and Temporality in Twentieth- and Twenty-First Century German Literature and Culture. Ed. With Bettina Brandt. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2022. 1-22.
  • “Hexen gegen Rassismus: Über die ‘Zeit, wo du zum einen die politische Auseinandersetzung hattest, zum anderen aber auch Raum für Ästhetik, Körper und Musik’.” [Witches Against Racism: About the ‘Time When You Had Political Engagement but Also Space for Aesthetics, the Body, and Music.’] Migrantischer Feminismus in der Frauen:bewegung in Deutschland (1985-2000) [Migrant Feminism in the Women’s* Movement in Germany (1985-2000)]. Ed. by Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez and Pinar Tuzcu. Münster: edition assemblage, 2021, 231-248.
  • “Berlin as a Migratory Setting.” The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of Berlin. Ed. by Andrew Webber. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. 206-226.
  • “Wordforce: Ethnicized Gender and Literary Style in Kanak Sprak and Koppstoff.” Feridun Zaimoglu. Ed. by Tom Cheesman and Karin E. Yesilada. Contemporary German Writers and Filmmakers Series. Bern: Peter Lang, 2012. 71-91.
  • “Memory Citizenship: Migrant Archives of Holocaust Remembrance in Contemporary Germany.” With Michael Rothberg. Parallax. Special Issue: “Transcultural Memory” 17.4 (2011): 32-48.
  • “Governing European Subjects: Tolerance and Guilt in the Discourse of ‘Muslim Women’” Cultural Critique 77.1 (2011): 70-101.
  • “Turkish Girls, Allah’s Daughters, and the Contemporary German Subject: Itinerary of a Figure.” German Life and Letters 62.3 (2009): 465-481.
  • “Immer noch keine Adresse in Deutschland? Adressierung als politische Strategie.” Kritik des Okzidentalismus: Transdisziplinäre Beiträge zu (Neo-)Orientalismus und Geschlecht. [Still no Address in Germany? Forms of Address as Political Strategy. Critique of Occidentalism: Transdisciplinary Contributions on (Neo-)Orientalism and Gender] Ed. by Gabriele Dietze, Claudia Brunner, and Edith Wenzel. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2009, 83-99.