Contributors

Oral Çalışlar was born in Tarsus in 1946. He graduated from the Faculty of Political Science of Ankara University. He is currently on the staff of Cumhuriyet newspaper. He has done news reporting for various TV stations. He has published extensively on Islam, the Kurdish question and womens’ issues. He is the author of seventeen books.

Susan J. Drucker, Professor, Department of Journalism/ Mass Media Studies, School of Communication, Hofstra University. She is an attorney, editor of the Free Speech Yearbook, and Series editor of Communication and Law series for Hampton Press. She is a past president of the New York State Communication Association, and Eastern Communication Association, for which still continues to serve as Legal Counsel to the Executive Counsel. She has been a member of international, national, regional and state communication organizations and has been an active member of the Media Ecology association serving on its advisory board, awards committee and board. She is the author and editor of 5 books and over 85 articles and book chapters. Her work examines the relationship between media technology and human factors, particularly as viewed from a legal perspective. This approach includes the examination of symbolic representation, verbal and visual and encompasses an international and intercultural dimension as well.

Yusuf Eradam has been teaching American Literature at and is the Chair of the Department of American Culture and Literature of Ankara University, where he started work in 1985. In 1977 he graduated from the Department of English Language and Literature of Hacettepe University, Ankara, and got his MA (1979) and PhD in English Literature from the same department. Eradam has books of poetry such as My Lips Bled Roses andThe Dirty Cushion Cover, and The Deluge Before the Self: Sylvia Plath and her Poetry. Eradam is also the editor, translator and contributor of many books such as Sylvia Plath’s, Ariel; Paul Auster’s, The City of Glass and The Locked Room; Okot p’Bitek’s, Song of Lawino; Herman Melville’s, Bartleby, the Scrivener, published in Borges’s Library of Babel. His last two books are entitled The Seeds of Revelation Times and Cookbook for Cannibals.

Paul Gordon received his Ph.D. fromYale University. He is a Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Professor Gordon’s published works include: The Critical Double: Figurative Meaning in Aesthetic Discourse; Rapturous Superabundance: Tragedy after Nietzsche; and Hitchcock/Freud (forthcoming), and numerous articles in other areas of literary studies.

John R. Groch holds a B.A. in American Civilization from Brown University and an M.A. and Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Iowa. He has served on the faculties of the University of Pittsburgh, Chatham College, and Bilkent University, where he has taught courses in film studies, media studies, and new media.

Gary Gumpert (Ph.D, 1963, Wayne State University) is Emeritus Professor of Communication at Queens College of the City University of New York and co-founder of Communication Landscapers, a consulting firm. He is president of the United States chapter of the International Institute of Communication. His primary research focuses on the nexus of communication technology and social relationships, particularly looking at urban and suburban development, the alteration of public space, and the changing nature of community. Professor Gumpert’s publications include: Talking Tombstones and Tales of the Media Age (1997); three edited volumes of Inter/Media: Interpersonal Communication in a Media Age published by Oxford University Press (1979, 1982, 1986) co-edited with Robert Cathcart; Talking to Strangers: Therapeutic Mediated Communication (Co-editor, Sandra L. Fish), 1990. For the past decade he has been working with Susan J. Drucker (Professor of Communication at Hofstra University). Their edited volumes include: Voices in the Streets: Gender, Media and Public Space, 1997; The Huddled Masses: Immigration and Communication, 1998. Real Law @ Virtual Space: Communication Regulation of Cyberspace, 1999, and Take Me Out to the Ballgame: Communicating Baseball, 2002.

Matthew Gumpert is an Assistant Professor at Bilkent University, and Coordinator of the Program in Cultures, Civilizations and Ideas. He received his B.A. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University (1984) and his M.A. and Ph. D., also in Comparative Literature, from Harvard University (1992), where he specialized in ancient Greek and Latin literature, and classical influences on modern culture. He has taught in departments of Comparative Literature and Classics at the University of Colorado at Boulder and the University of Wisconsin - Madison. Professor Gumpert has published articles in Criticism, Qui Parle, and the Journal of Modern Greek Studies. His book Grafting Helen: The Abduction of the Classical Past, has recently come out with the University of Wisconsin Press. He is currently working on two books: the first on representations and reproductions of the Venus de Milo; the second on the debate between Greece and Great Britain over the possession of the Parthenon Marbles.

Barış Kılıçbay works as a research assistant at Gazi University, Faculty of Communication, and is currently writing his doctoral dissertation at Ankara University. His articles on consumer culture and Islamic veiling, communication and information technologies, film theory, Turkish cinema, transnational films, and reality television have appeared in a number of journals and books. He serves on the editorial board of Studies in European Cinema.

Meltem Kıran-Raw is an assistant professor at the Department of American Culture and Literature at Başkent University, Ankara. Her teaching interests include mythology, history of Western civilization, ethnic literature, and short fiction. Her reseach interests are narrative theory, American print media, and contemporary American popular culture.

Bennett Lowenthal is the Assistant Public Affairs Officer at the U.S. Consulate General in Istanbul. His prior Foreign Service postings include Zagreb, Copenhagen, Porto Alegre and Washington. He holds academic degrees from Yale and UCLA, and has published work in the United States and abroad.

Leo Mahoney Since 1997, Leo J. Mahoney (Ph. D., Kent State, 1981) has taught in Başkent University's American culture department, Erciyes University's English department and (since January 2003) Kafkas University's English department. He has lectured in Russia, Syria, Northern Cyprus, Hungary, Austria, Bulgaria, and China as well as throughout Turkey and the United States. His reviews, essays and articles have appeared in encyclopedias, symposia publications, and journals in Britain, Turkey, China, Russia and the United States. He is currently working on an article about Robert Wayne Smith, late of the history department at Oregon State University.

Vernon Hyde Minor is a Professor in the Departments of Art and Art History and Comparative Literature and Humanities at the University of Colorado at Boulder, USA. He is also the Editor of the Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome. His book on "The Death of the Baroque in the Birth of Good Taste" will appear in 2004 from Cambridge University Press.

Mahmut Mutman teaches cultural theory, media and cultural studies in the Department of Communication and Design at Bilkent University. He has several articles on orientalism, cultural theory and media studies published in Cultural Critique, Postmodern Culture, New Formations and Toplum ve Bilim.

Michael Oppermann graduated from Hamburg University in 1982 with a Ph.D. on German radio drama. Since then he has published numerous articles on film, radio drama and the postmodern novel. Michael Oppermann has taught at Hacettepe University between 1987 and 1995. Since 1997 he has been the director of Abendgymnasium Bautzen in Germany.

Gerhard Richter teaches literary and cultural theory, intellectual history, and visual culture at the University of Wisconsin—Madison, where he is Associate Professor of German, Comparative Literature, and Integrated Liberal Studies. He is the author of Walter Benjamin and the Corpus of Autobiography (2000; 2002) as well as the editor of Benjamin’s Ghosts (2002) and of Literary Paternity, Literary Friendship (2002).

Sırma Soran Gumpert is an instructor at Ankara University, in the Department of American Culture and Literature. She received her MA and Ph.D. degrees from the same department. Her dissertation “Staging the Soul: Eugene O’Neill and American Expressionism” was a study of the influence of European Expressionism on American drama in the 1920s and 30s. Her postdoctoral work has moved to a more interdisciplinary direction drawing connections between contemporary American drama and the visual arts.