Rate My Professor Merve Sarıkaya-Şen

Assoc. Prof. Dr. Merve Sarıkaya-Şen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Foreign Language Education, Faculty of Education, at Middle East Technical University (METU) in Ankara, Turkey. She currently serves as the ELIT Coordinator. Sarıkaya-Şen obtained her BA in Foreign Language Education from METU's Faculty of Education, Department of Foreign Language Education, in 2004. She completed her MA at METU's Graduate School of Social Sciences in 2007, with a thesis titled "A Julia Kristevan analysis of Emily Dickinson and John Milton." In 2016, she earned her PhD in English Language and Literature from Hacettepe University, Social Sciences Institute, Department of English Language and Literature, based on her dissertation "The representations of trauma and trauma coping strategies in Grace Nichols's poetry." Her research interests include Contemporary Literatures in English, Ethics and Poetics, Literary Criticism, Trauma, Memory, and Vulnerability Studies, Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Transnational, Diasporic, and Postcolonial Literatures.

Sarıkaya-Şen has produced a substantial body of scholarly work published in leading academic journals and books. Key articles comprise "Rivers Solomon’s An Unkindness of Ghosts: Cruel Optimism and Meritocracy in an Engendered Critical Dystopia" in Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses (2025), "From Utopia to an Eco-Feminist Critical Dystopia: Diane Cook’s The New Wilderness" in Women: A Cultural Review (2023), "Building Resilience and Interconnectedness among Humans and Nonhuman Entities: Aminatta Forna's Happiness" in European Review (2021), "Reconfiguring Feminism: Bernardine Evaristo's Girl, Woman, Other" in The European Legacy: Toward New Paradigms? (2021), "Contemporary Trauma Narratives: Liminality and the Ethics of Form" in English Studies (2018), and "The Representation of Trauma and Trauma Coping Strategies in Grace Nichols's I is a Long Memoried Woman" in English Studies (2017). She has also contributed chapters to Routledge-edited volumes, including "Attending to the Victims of (in)visible Violence: Elided Potentialities Revisited in Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These" (2025), "Migration Crisis in Contemporary Literature: A Journey through Loss and Hope" (2025), and "Diversity, Singularity, Reenchantment and Relationality in a Transmodern World: Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness" (2020). Additionally, she co-authored the introduction "Introduction. Contemporary Literature in Times of Crisis and Vulnerability: Trauma, Demise of Sovereignty and Interconnectedness" for European Review (2021). Through these works, Sarıkaya-Şen explores themes of trauma, resilience, feminism, dystopia, migration, and relational ethics in contemporary Anglophone fiction.