Vahit Turhan (1913-1984) was among the outstanding scholars of the early period of the Republic of Türkiye and was key in the shaping of Shakespeare studies in Türkiye.
Receiving his PhD from Cambridge University, Turhan was among the core team of academics who established and shaped the English Language and Literature Department at İstanbul University in the 1940s. His research interests included Medieval English Literature and Early Modern English Literature. Fluent in English, German, and French, Turhan was an exemplary polyglot and polymath.
Turhan worked with figures like Mina Urgan and Berna Moran under the mentorship of the head of the department, Halide Edip Adıvar. Together they translated some of Shakespeare’s works into Turkish, which resulted from translation workshops that led to the publication of the Shakespeare Külliyatı, the Shakespeare Collection. Several plays, like Hamlet (1941), As You Like It (1943), Coriolanus (1945), or Antony and Cleopatra (1949) were translated and edited by these figures, including Turhan.
Personal library
Turhan also wrote on Shakespeare, such as the elaborative passages in his English Literature Survey books he wrote at high school, university and open university level.
Having served as Lecturer and Dean of the Faculty of Letters at İstanbul University where he had been Professor of English Literature and Culture, Turhan was also a Visiting Professor at Princeton and Harvard, and Director of National Education in İstanbul.
This is just a brief overview of a very remarkable career where Turhan educated many future Shakespeareans scholars in Türkiye.
Assoc. Prof. Dr. Murat Öğütcü received his PhD degree with his dissertation entitled “Shakespeare’s Satirical Representation of the Elizabethan Court and the Nobility in His English History Plays” from the Department of English Language and Literature at Hacettepe University, Turkey, in 2016. From August 2012 to January 2013, he was a visiting scholar at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He was the Head of the Department of Western Languages and Literatures at Munzur University, Turkey, between 2016 and 2021. He is currently working at Adıyaman University, Turkey. He is the General Editor of the “Turkish Shakespeares” Project that aims to introduce texts, productions and research on Turkish Shakespeares to a broader international audience of students, teachers, and researchers. He is among the regional editors of the Global Shakespeares Project and the World Shakespeare Bibliography. Along with MEMOs Events Editor, Aisha Hussain, he is co-Editor of the MEMOs edited collection, Materializing the East in Early Modern English Drama, forthcoming from Arden Studies in Early Modern Drama (2023). He has written book chapters and articles on his research interests that include early modern studies, Shakespeare, and cultural studies. His recent essays include “Materializing Mamluks and Turks in Salterne’s Tomumbeius” (Arden, 2023), “Contemporary Turkish Shakespeares: New Breath to Old Lives” (Arden, 2023), “Elizabethan Audience Gaze at History Plays: Liminal Time and Space in Shakespeare’s Richard II” (Routledge, 2022), “İkinci Katil [The Second Murderer]: A Turkish Adaptation of Shakespeare’s Scottish Play, Macbeth” (English Studies, 2021), “Of Pistols and Pikes: Weapons of War in Shakespeare’s Henry V” (PU Blaise Pascal, 2021), “Teaching Shakespeare Digitally: The Turkish Experience” (Research in Drama Education, 2020), “Masculine Dreams: Henry V and the Jacobean Politics of Court Performance” (Cambridge UP, 2019), “Julius Caesar: Tyrannicide Made Unpopular” (Parergon, 2017), and “Shakespeare in Animation” (Hacettepe, 2014).
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