Danyel Büyükaşık

Danyel Büyükaşık is a doctoral researcher of Anglophone literatures and cultures. He is a PhD candidate at Goethe University Frankfurt, where he currently teaches as an adjunct lecturer. He holds a state examination in English and Politics and Society from the Julius Maximilians University of Würzburg and a Master of Arts in Anglophone Literatures, Cultures and Media from Goethe University Frankfurt. His work is mainly concerned with how dispossession, exploitation, and displacement shape culture, with a focus on literature. Furthermore, his research interests include cultural memory studies, prison narratives, labour and ecology, new materialisms, visual culture studies, and critical Indigenous studies. Since 2026, he has been a PhD scholarship recipient of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation.

In his PhD project with the working title “Memories of 20th Century Levantine Displacements in Anglophone Diasporic Literatures”, supervised by Prof. Dr Nadia Butt and Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Astrid Erll (second supervisor), he explores the ways multiple histories of uprooting that have developed throughout the 20th century in the Levant are remembered in contemporary Anglophone literatures. The differentiated displacements that form the historical background of the literary works analysed in this project are the Palestinian Nakba, the forced migration of Jews from Arab countries – representing two processes resulting from the manifestation of ethno-nationalisms in the mid-century – the Lebanese mass-exodus amid the Lebanese civil war, and the displacement of Iraqi Kurds in the face of the Anfal campaigns – standing in as cases triggered by sectarian and ethno-nationalist violence in the second half of the century. Foregrounding these processes’ material and discursive connections through the lens of the Levant instead of focusing on a specific national, religious, or ethnic community, this study aims to conduct a comparative and relational analysis of literature on forced migration in the region that dually accounts for macro-processes of colonial divisions, nation-building, and sectarianism, as well as subaltern histories of persistence and solidarity.   

Relevant publication:

2025. “Transfiguring Spatial Debilities in Isabella Hammad’s Enter Ghost (2023).” European Journal of English Studies 29 (3): 515–532. https://doi.org/10.1080/13825577.2025.2587658.