Pelin Kivrak

Pelin Kivrak is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Writing, Literature & Publishing at Emerson College. There, she teaches courses on global literature, literary theory, the history of the novel, cultural translation, and the ethics of emerging technologies. Trained as a comparatist, she works across literature, philosophy, film, and the visual arts, with a particular interest in how contemporary narratives and media forms negotiate responsibility and generate new chronotopes and aesthetic strategies that unsettle inherited paradigms of representation.

Kivrak's earlier research on responsibility, hospitality, and cosmopolitanism culminated in her dissertation, Imperfect Cosmopolitans. The work examined how contemporary literature, film, and art reimagine ethical encounters with strangers and the dilemmas of belonging within a global frame. The project argued that aesthetic form can illuminate the tensions and possibilities of cosmopolitan thought precisely where theoretical discourse reaches its limits. Essays from this body of work have appeared in Comparative Literature Studies, symplokē, and the Journal of World Literature, among other venues.

Building on this foundation, Kivrak’s current research turns to emerging modes of realism and narrative design in global fiction and film. One line of inquiry traces the shifting contours of the marriage and divorce plot in contemporary culture. Another, on what she terms “atmospheric realism,” adapts a concept from art history to theorize a literary mode in which ambience, mood, and perceptual drift take precedence over eventfulness and psychological depth.

Her book project in progress, tentatively titled Literatures of Maintenance: Repairing, Preserving, and Rewriting the World, proposes “maintenance” and “middle distance” as new categories for reading world literature. At once material, ethical, and aesthetic, the notion of maintenance invokes repair, care, and preservation as counterpoints to the spectacle and novelty that dominate the global literary economy.

Alongside her academic work, Kivrak serves as Head of Academic Research & Publications at Refik Anadol Studio, a leading new media arts practice based in Los Angeles. Since 2014, she has shaped the studio’s research program and authored curatorial texts for large-scale installations presented worldwide. Her writing in this field situates data- and AI-driven art within broader cultural, historical, and ethical discourses, emphasizing sustainability, equity, and the interpretive possibilities of machine intelligence.

Kivrak holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Yale University and a BA in Literature from Harvard University. Before joining Emerson, she was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard’s Mahindra Humanities Center and taught in the English Department at Tufts University.

Current Courses

• LI120: Introduction to Literary Studies
• LI211: Contemporary Middle Eastern Narratives
• LI416: Cultural Translations
• LI423: The Global Novel
• LI423: Large, Loose, Baggy Monsters
• LI498: Her Name in the Title