Ayşe Çelikkol focuses on nineteenth-century British literature in relation to economic history and ecology.
Her book, Romances of Free Trade: British Literature, Laissez-Faire, and the Global Nineteenth Century (Oxford University Press, 2011), examines romance elements in British literature that represent the emergence of a globalized free-market economy. She is currently working on a manuscript, Abstract Harvests: Capitalist Agriculture and Nineteenth-Century British Literature, which relates narration, character, and literary genre to historical transformations in farming. Attentive to Britain’s position as the epicenter of capitalist agriculture in the nineteenth century, the project explores poetry, fiction, and travel writing by William Cobbett, John Clare, Alfred Tennyson, George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, Thomas Hardy, and others.
Her articles and book chapters connect nineteenth-century literature to economic developments such as the market economy and globalization, and to political thought on secularism and ecology.
Dr. Çelikkol holds undergraduate degrees in electrical and electronics engineering (Bilkent University, 1998) and literary studies (Beloit College, 2000). After receiving her PhD at Rice University in English literature (2006) and working as an assistant professor at Macalester College’s English Department (2005-2009), she returned to Ankara in 2010 to teach at Bilkent.
PUBLICATIONS
Book
Romances of Free Trade: British Literature, Laissez-Faire, and the Global Nineteenth Century, Oxford University Press, 2011.
Articles
“Secularity and the Limits of Reason in Swinburne’s ‘Hymn to Proserpine’ and ‘Hymn of Man,” Victorian Literature and Culture 49.2 (2021): 301-24.
“Capitalism in the Pastoral Mode and Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 42.5 (2021): 523-36.
“World Ecology in Martineau’s and Gaskell’s Colonial Pastorals,” Journal of Victorian Culture 25.1 (2020): 110-125.
“The Planetary in Morris’s Late Romances,” The Journal of William Morris Studies 22.4 (2018): 15-30.
“The Inorganic Aesthetic in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend,” Partial Answers 14 (2016): 1-20.
“Secular Pleasures and Fitzgerald’s Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám,” Victorian Poetry 51.4 (2013): 511-32.
“Form and Global Consciousness in the Victorian Period,” Literature Compass 10 (2013): 269-76.
“Free Trade and Disloyal Smugglers in Scott’s Guy Mannering and Redgauntlet,” ELH: English Literary History 74.4 (2007): 759-82.
“Dionysian Music, Patriotic Sentiment, and Tennyson’s Idylls of the King,” Victorian Poetry 45.3 (2007): 239-56.
“Aesthetic Predicaments, the Market Economy, and Stoddard’s The Morgesons,” American Literature 78.1 (2006): 29-57.
Chapters in Books
“Historical Ecologies in Heterodox Economic Thought and Literary Realism of the 1860s,” in Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: the 1860s, ed., Pamela K. Gilbert (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).
“Workers as Artists: From Professional Authorship to the Palace of Delight in Besant’s Writing,” in Walter Besant: The Business of Literature and the Pleasures of Reform, ed. Kevin A. Morrison (Liverpool University Press, 2019).
“Expansion in the Fossil Economy and Craik’s John Halifax, Gentleman,” in From Political Economy to Economics through Nineteenth-Century Literature, eds. Elaine Hadley, Audrey Jaffe, Sarah Winter (Palgrave, 2019).
“Dickens, Political Economy, and Money,” The Oxford Handbook of Charles Dickens, ed. Robert L. Patten, John O. Jordan, and Catherine Waters (London: Oxford University Press, 2018).
“Globalization and Economics,” The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture, ed. Juliet John (London: Oxford University Press, 2016).
Other
“Thematic Review: Economics and Industrialization,” forthcoming in SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500-1900.