About
Dr. Vuslat D. Katsanis specializes in comparative literature, film, and visual culture, with a particular focus on Turkish and global migrant cultural productions, as well as critical theory. She is currently a co-founding director of publications and curator of contemporary art at the MinEastry of Postcollapse Art and Culture (MPAC), an independently run curatorial project and research space based in Zurich, Switzerland. Through MPAC, Katsanis has curated numerous contemporary multimedia art exhibitions across the USA, Europe, and Türkiye, fostering critical dialogue on postcollapse art and cultural resilience.
A former tenured professor in the Literary Arts and Studies program at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, Katsanis also serves as an Assistant Editor of Poetry at Asymptote magazine. Her scholarly and creative contributions include essays on the films of Nuri Bilge Ceylan and Fatih Akin, investigations into urban visual culture in Türkiye, and translations of fiction and poetry between Turkish and English. She is the coeditor of A Socially Just Classroom: Transdisciplinary Approaches to Teaching Writing Across the Humanities (Vernon Press, 2022).
Katsanis holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature with a certificate in Critical Theory and an M.A. in Visual Studies from the University of California, Irvine.
Work
Postcollapse Art
MinEastry of Postcollapse Art and Culture
An Art & Research Space in Zurich, Switzerland
A Socially Just Classroom: Transdisciplinary Approaches to Teaching Writing Across the Humanities
Teaching: Recent, Current, and Upcoming Courses
Writing Visual Culture: the Image in Cultural and Critical Theory
We live in an image-saturated world. From advertisements to web interfaces to the shaping of our urban spaces and the presentation of own profiles, visual images permeate every aspect of our daily lives. In our visual culture, images play a central role in how we compose ourselves and communicate meaning. We read and think through images and are involved in daily forms of visual contact and exchange. By taking a critical and philosophical approach to the study of visual culture, this program asks: How do we perceive and navigate our ever-expansive visual culture? How do images and visual sign-systems make meaning? What are the histories and politics surrounding ways of seeing, our aesthetic judgments, and our taste? How have artist and scholars challenged vision and visuality? (more)
Comparative Literature and World Cinema: Reading Globalectically
Born in Kenya, author and postcolonial literary theorist, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, coined the term “globalectics” to call for a decentered view of the world, one in which the flatness of the English-speaking order is productively rounded out by the multitude of other languages and expressive traditions. For Ngũgĩ, “Reading globalectically is a way of approaching any text from whatever times and places to allow its content to form a free conversation with other texts of one’s time and place… It is to read a text with the eyes of the world; it is to see the world with the eyes of the text. (more)
Literary Arts & Studies Path: Writing Retreat
This mini-course is for creative writers who'd like a chance to connect and gather for community, conversation, creative play, critique, short workshops, professional skills, and time to write. (more)
Education
Comperative Literature, PhD
University of California, Irvine
Visual Studies, MA
University of California, Irvine
Dual Major in Art & Literature, BA
University of California, Riverside
Recent Press
1989: The Postcollapse in Art and Culture at Cerritos College by Austin Janish
Go to Art and Cake LA
Mother, Earth, Air: Yulia Pinkusevich and Sakha Aesthesis at MPAC
Cluster Essays on Postcollapse Art
Go to ASAP/j