Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2024, Interdisciplinary Arts (Fine Arts)

Kurdish cinema represents a vital transnational and global art form that bridges the Kurdish community, uniting a stateless people through cultural expression. This dissertation explores common narrative threads of Kurdish cinema relating to identity, statelessness, trauma, and women's issues, despite the differences between Kurds of various nationalities in both the ancestral Kurdistan region and the diaspora. The first chapter examines how these artworks confront issues of identity, exile, and homeland. The second interrogates depictions of individual and collective trauma in Kurdish cinema, especially generational trauma resulting from racism, conflict, and displacement. Chapter 3 analyzes Kurdish cinema from a comparative perspective through the lens of Indigenous studies, examining how Kurdish cinema confronts settler-colonial oppression. The fourth and final chapter addresses the portrayal of Kurdish women's issues in Kurdish cinema, contrasting how male and female directors represent these issues and emphasizing the vital contributions of Kurdish women filmmakers especially with regard to telling Kurdish women's stories. Ultimately this work positions Kurdish cinema as a powerful artistic movement spanning national and international boundaries driven by the efforts of a distinct filmmaking community united in the desire to represent Kurdish identity and culture through cinematic storytelling.

Committee: Charles Buchanan (Advisor); Andrea Frohne (Committee Member); Ghirmai Negash (Committee Member); Nukhet Sandal (Committee Member) Subjects: Film Studies; Middle Eastern Studies; Minority and Ethnic Groups; Womens Studies

Doctor of Philosophy, University of Akron, 2016, History

My dissertation is a world history project that offers an historical perspective for understanding the existence and meaning of honor crimes. I focus on the history of honor-related violence in Turkey, which I contend can only be understood within the international context of twentieth-century modernization, state-formation, and nationalist projects. The Turkish nationalist state initiated an intensive process of modernization beginning in the late 1920s and lasting through the majority of the 20th century. My project examines the impact the nationalist modernization project had on the culture of honor and the existence of honor-related gendered violence, and argues against the ahistorical portrayal of Middle Eastern societies as “backward” bastions of patriarchy. Instead, I propose that honor-related violence has a very specific, yet complex recent history that has as much to do with “modernization” as it does with tradition. Although my project focuses on Turkey, I include a case study of honor crimes as discussed in Brazilian legal codes that were created or preserved by nationalist “modernizing” regimes. This study offers a nuanced historical explanation, on the one hand, of the ways in which the culture of honor and the nationalist state overlapped and often supported one another, and on the other hand, of how nationalist modernizing projects created the environments in which honor crimes tended to proliferate, such as during periods of civil war and in communities that are marginalized due to institutionalized racial, gendered, and ethno-nationalist discrimination.

Committee: Janet Klein Dr. (Advisor); Tracey Jean Boisseau Dr. (Committee Member); Martha Santos Dr. (Committee Member); Richard Steigmann-Gall Dr. (Committee Member); Maria Alejandra Zanetta Dr. (Committee Member) Subjects: Comparative; Gender Studies; History; Latin American History; Latin American Studies; Middle Eastern History; Middle Eastern Studies; World History