About Us

Department of Turkish Language and Literature

The Boğaziçi University Turkish Language and Literature Department offers degrees at the undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral levels. Our undergraduate and graduate programs seek to examine literary texts with a comparative and interdisciplinary approach by combining methods of close reading with historical and theoretical analysis. Our programs focus on the subjects, issues, and methods of Turkish language and literature, while often treating these together with other cultural products, in a dynamic dialogue with various fields in the social sciences. This interdisciplinary perspective is combined with a comparative approach looking to understand interrelations with other literary traditions.

Our students are instructed by a faculty whose work is founded on academic interaction in the classroom and beyond, on national and international levels. We expose our students  to different areas of study and to different ways of learning and thinking, thus helping them gain insight into the intersections between the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. They acquire the necessary experience to work in diverse careers and become successful future researchers.

Following Boğaziçi University’s liberal arts tradition, our diverse curriculum teaches the critical skills of analyzing literary texts and writing about them. They learn to combine their skills in critical reading and writing with research skills enabling them to understand texts, periods and movements in their historical and social contexts. This way our students are exposed to different areas of study and different ways of learning and thinking. They gain insight into the intersections between the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences as well as the experience necessary to work in diverse careers and pursue degrees in graduate programs.

We are doing all this based on our background of over 30 years and the experience gained through it. The beginning of our department dates back to the 1970’s. Two prominent figures in the history of Turkology, namely Fahir İz and Ali Alparslan, gave Turkish Literature and Ottoman Turkish courses in the Linguistics and Literature Department (currently known as the Department of Western Languages and Literatures) in those years, and these lectures set the foundation of our department.

Our undergraduate program, as in all Turkish Language and Literature departments, is based upon courses in the fields of

1) Old Turkish Literature

2) Modern Turkish Literature

3) The history and structure of Turkish and

4) Folk literature.

Among the courses related to language, along with those specific to classical philology, we also offer courses designed according to modern linguistic methods.

The Boğaziçi University Turkish Language and Literature Department has combined this structure, specific to general Turkology, with the distinctive educational perspective of our university. On the one hand, departmental courses are given using the most thorough and extensive techniques, while on the other hand, our students can take social sciences, natural sciences, and humanities courses from other departments as electives. An undergraduate B.A. degree holder is thus both fully equipped with a sound knowledge of the discipline of Turkish language and literature and has also enriched his/her academic knowledge and experience in a multidisciplinary way.

A similar richness is also our aim in terms of language. Those students who have passed the English proficiency exam and are registered in our department learn Ottoman Turkish and Turkish grammar in depth during their freshman and sophomore years and are entitled to take Persian and Arabic as departmental electives. Students may also attend the language courses offered by other departments, such as French, German, Spanish, Russian, Japanese, and Chinese.

We show the same attention and care that we show to undergraduate studies to the graduate and doctoral studies as well. We follow with hope, as our potential colleagues, each and every student who enters the graduate program, and we congratulate the doctoral graduates as our new colleagues.

Our graduate program covers both old and modern literature courses and ends with a dissertation written on a topic chosen by the student. Our doctoral program, on the other hand, begins directly with either old or new literature. On all levels of education, we both underline the relationship between the various fields of Turkology and promote an interdisciplinary perspective.

The Turkish Language and Literature Department, due to the graduate program and research interests of the faculty, does not concentrate on the field of “Turkish Language.” However, we must emphasize the fact that we offer Ottoman Turkish, Arabic, Persian, and Ottoman paleography courses to students from other departments. Moreover, we have a unit offering Turkish courses at various levels for students coming from abroad.

Our department supports the progress of students and the social and cultural life of the University by holding and organizing conferences, seminars, symposia, and workshops. In this sense we are also aiming to diversify our education with guest instructors on both the undergraduate and graduate levels.

An important note about our department: Although Boğaziçi is an English-language university, the majority of our courses are given in Turkish due to the nature of the material.