Ayşe Çelikkol specializes in nineteenth-century British literature. Her research pursues connections between Romantic / Victorian literature and economic history. Recently, she has been writing about the ways in which novels and poems from the period respond to the environmental dimensions of economic phenomena.
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. Her current book project triangulates nineteenth- century British literature with economic history and ecology. Attentive to Britain’s position as the epicenter of capitalist agriculture in the nineteenth century, the project turns to fiction, poetry, and travel writing about crop and animal husbandry, with chapters on William Cobbett, John Clare, George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, Thomas Hardy, and others. Delving into diverse elements of rural life from turnpike roads and sheep shearing to harvest suppers and guano, the project argues that literature about farming produced novel understandings of time, beauty, and abstraction by reflecting on the newly pervasive reach of market relations in the countryside.
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).