By Jenée Wilde, Senior Instructor, Department of English

Baran Germen is an assistant professor of film and media studies at Colorado College. In 2018, he graduated with a PhD in comparative literature from University of Oregon, where he also completed a certificate degree in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies and specialized in film studies. His research and teaching focus on global cinema and comparative media studies, cutting across melodrama, queer theory, and Islam and secularism. 

In 2016–17, Germen was awarded the CSWS Jane Grant Dissertation Fellowship for his project, “Melodramatics of Turkish Modernity: Vurun Kahpeye [Strike the Slut] and Its Cinematic Afterlife.” In April of this year, he returned to the UO campus to give a talk for a global cinemas film course taught by CSWS Director Sangita Gopal. I had the pleasure of interviewing him at that time for the Annual Review. As a Jane Grant Fellow myself (2014–5, “Speculative Fictions, Bisexual Lives: Changing Frameworks of Sexual Desire”), I was curious how Germen’s award year compared to my own and what outcomes he saw from the support:

JENÉE WILDE: You were the Jane Grant Fellowship winner for 2016–17 and graduated in 2018 with a PhD in comparative literature. What did getting the fellowship allow you to do for that award year?

BARAN GERMEN: I think just to be with my research without course obligations, so it really bought me that time I probably wouldn’t have had otherwise. And considering most of the people in my department take seven or eight years to finish, just finishing in seven years is good, I think. 

WILDE: It was similar for me. It took me seven years to finish my PhD in English, and I only had funding for six, so that last year as the Jane Grant Fellow was a huge gift—to be able to keep working on my project and not have to fulfill teaching responsibilities. So, you graduated in comp lit. Did you go on the market immediately after that?

GERMEN: I was on the market my last year immediately. Because of comp lit, I was applying for jobs in multiple disciplines, and I think it was thanks to the Jane Grant that I was becoming a more serious candidate for women’s and gender studies departments, so I got a couple of interviews in that field as well. The fellowship and having a certificate from the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies really built my profile and made me a good candidate for women’s and gender studies and queer studies programs. So that’s the other thing I would say, especially since I was in a comp lit program, it really expanded my horizons for the job market.

WILDE: So where are you now?

GERMEN: I’m at Colorado College in the film and media studies program, but I teach cultural studies courses, I teach queer cinema, and do a bunch of gender and sexuality stuff there. I started out in a visitor position and entered a tenure track job the following year.

WILDE: Did you have to reapply or was it a smooth transition?

GERMEN: Reapply, but I was probably the strongest candidate because they knew me. CC usually hires people first as a visitor just because the college has this thing called “block plan,” which is a very different sort of structure for the academic year. You still have two semesters, but each semester is divided into four blocks. And each of these blocks are like summer sessions in which students take one class at a time and faculty teach one class at a time. You have them from nine to three every day for three-and-a-half weeks. So that’s the equivalent of a semester of time.

WILDE: Wow, that’s intense. 

GERMEN: Yes, it’s very intense, but the good thing about it is you don’t teach all four blocks in a semester; you get one block off, so if you couple that with a holiday, then you have extended breaks in the year. And in your non-teaching blocks, you don’t have to think about teaching at all; you’re focusing on research. So, it’s big chunks of intense time but it fits my temperament, so I like it. But because it’s a unique structure, what they want to do is to bring in people first as a visitor just to see how they are fitting and if they’re enjoying it.

WILDE: I’ve heard of that structure before—not at liberal arts colleges but in trade schools. What are the things you’ve been able to teach there?

GERMEN: I’ve been teaching the core classes—introduction to film studies, advanced theory, and research methods. We also have a cultural studies initiative we’re working to start as a new program, so I’ve begun teaching introduction to cultural studies for first year students as well as a more advanced level. Then there’s global queer cinema, Middle Eastern cinemas, and melodrama. I’ve been really enjoying a recent class I developed on new media publics and social movements that looks at how in this new media environment we as citizens are active participants in social movements. Usually, my gender and sexuality focus is along the lines of queer studies and melodrama—that’s what I did my dissertation on.

WILDE: I also did my dissertation in queer studies, and it was both ethnographic and textual in focus. Because I did a folklore emphasis in the English PhD program, I got that nice cultural studies cross-section, too, looking at bisexuality narratives in science fiction and working with communities in Minneapolis where there’s a bisexuality conference—one of the longest running ones in the US. My research looked at overlaps among science fiction fan and bisexuality communities there. Part of my textual analysis involved a bisexuality fanzine produced in Minneapolis the 1980s that was trying to bridge three communities—zines, science fiction fans, and LGBT folks—and bring them all together. It was a fascinating look at how these different communities negotiate positionality and identities in an emerging queer space before that language was really available. 

GERMEN: Wow, so your study was localized and regionalized, and maybe national because of the conference going on, it sounds like. 

WILDE: Yes, it was a nice intersection of a lot of different things. I got to conduct focus groups, individual interviews, do a deep dive into archival history, then do textual analysis of some key science fiction novels, too.

GERMEN: With the Jane Grant, were you able to travel to do those things? 

WILDE: I’d finished all my travel before that with other fellowships I’d gotten from the university, so I just spent that year writing, and it was so nice.

GERMEN: Me, too, actually. I did my research before the Jane Grant, so that year it was all about writing. And I also, by the way, finished up a different article that was irrelevant to my dissertation research, thanks to the Jane Grant.¹ Having that much time was amazing.

WILDE: Yeah, I also had a couple of articles published out of the dissertation as a result of the connections I had made in Minneapolis.² Speaking of the dissertation, is yours being turned into a book now? What’s your progress with your work from that time?

GERMEN: I have a complicated relationship with that work. I feel it’s good work, but it’s just that politically it’s not the right time to be messing with that work I did. Because essentially, my site is Turkey and my dissertation provides critique of secularism as exercised in Turkey through a particularly melodramatic imaginary, which focuses on gender victimization as a sort of ethos. Turkey is now a totalitarian regime, and so it’s not really time to be critiquing secularism, I think.

WILDE: Yes, there were some very big shifts after Trump came in and there was this rise in authoritarian regimes around the world at that point.

GERMEN: Literally the same thing with Erdoğan in my country, Modi in India, Orbán in Hungary—they’re all mirror faces of each other.

WILDE: I could see how that could be dangerous right now.

GERMEN: More than that, I feel emotionally a little distant. Not that I’m going to let that project go away for sure, it’s just that I need more time, which is hard while teaching in short semester blocks. I get more excited about other projects. I need a little more political stability and then time to reframe the project, which requires more emotional and intellectual labor to make it more fitting for our times. It just wouldn’t read well these days, which is always part of the dissertation becoming a book—that reframing has to happen. I will have half a year for my sabbatical next fall, but I might have to hold on until I’m tenured. With the security of tenure and the time it gives me, I think I will be able to do that.

WILDE: I’m going on sabbatical in the fall, too, and I’m also looking forward to the freedom to work on a long project again. With your dissertation book project on the backburner, what are you working on? What’s your current research exploring?

GERMEN: I’m doing a couple of things. First, I’m doing an article on Turkish TV, which is the biggest TV exporter in the world after the US. It has a huge market, especially the global South. It’s melodrama again—these soapy historical fictions or domestic melodramas. These shows are usually understood within traditions such as communication studies or audience reception studies for transnational audiences and markets. I’m wanting to think of the Turkish TV format and also the melodramatic form through a more aesthetic lens. I’d like to bring melodrama into that discussion. I’m interested in the spaces for these shows, such as old iconic waterfront mansions shown as domestic spaces. What’s interesting is that these melodramas are usually shot on location, which is very different from how TV melodrama usually finds its expression, using sets in most cases. So I’m thinking about the historicity of these specific spaces and how this informs the aesthetics of melodrama, which then gives me a way to think about domestic space as a public space. This goes back to the personal as political—the domestic is actually public. The other project I have is an article in progress on a recent Italian film, Sorrentino’s The Hand of God, where I try to think the grotesque together with melodrama. This unlikely connection allows me to provide a queer reading of this heterosexual coming-of-age story. So short article projects.

WILDE: What did you come to talk about with Sangita’s class? What was your presentation? 

GERMEN: It was from that class I was talking about, new media publics and social movements, which looks at these contemporary revolutions or social movements usually in the global South and more specifically in the Middle East and how the new media environment is shifting their understanding of political activism. Sometimes I teach courses like this that I’m genuinely interested in, but I have no real interest in publishing on. My relationship with these materials is for teaching and keeping up with the interesting work coming in through new media, but also for my students who I find to be more and more engaged politically each year. It’s about bridging this gap between academia and activism and providing an intellectual framing for our contemporary world. What I brought here reveals the two major axes of my interest in the relationship between media and social movements. First, looking at the Arab Spring, I want us to think of the body as a medium but one that is heavily gendered at the moment of its pubic appearance. Secondly, I invite us to understand visuality not as a neutral field but as a domain of power through Israel’s ongoing settler colonialism as portrayed in the documentary 5 Broken Cameras.

WILDE: So you’re still bringing your interest in politics into your teaching and activism, but holding off on publishing on those contexts right now. It’s not really the right time to publish, but you’re still being very active in your research, exploration, and teaching of those topics. It sounds like this all will accumulate into something more in the future.

GERMEN: I’m definitely interested in the relationship between older conventional media forms, such as documentary film making, but also that creative outlet through digital media technologies. What are the interactions between the two, the affordances, potentialities, and limitations of these together in these really fraught political contexts?

WILDE: Do you feel like you might like to be a film producer at any point, working in the creative end of things instead of the theoretical-academic end of things?

GERMEN: Maybe. We have amazing filmmakers in our program, but I’m not really versed in that kind of work. Maybe once I have tenure. There’s still a kind of insecurity right now, but the confidence and security I think tenure will bring will be important. I just went through my third-year review this year, and I realized before the review that I was stressed and anxious even if there was no reason to be. My conversation with the dean had lots of positive feedback.

WILDE: I imagine your first three years being interrupted by a pandemic didn’t help your sense of how you’re doing.

GERMEN: Absolutely. I had another fellowship—after I was hired on the tenure clock, I got a Mellon diversity fellowship which gave me a reduced teaching load my first two years, which was great, but then the pandemic hit. 

WILDE: Anything else you think would be interesting to share from the expanded opportunities that the Jane Grant Fellowship gave you?

GERMEN: It’s really helped me build my profile very strongly as a candidate in multiple disciplines, and enabled my work and myself to be recognized. When it came time for the dissertation, on multiple levels, it truly affected my life in positive ways.   

—Jenée Wilde is a senior instructor of English and research dissemination specialist for CSWS. Her most recent article, “Science Fiction Paradox and the Transgender Look: How Time Travel Queers Spectatorship in Predestination,” was published in Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media (vol. 60, Spring 2021). Currently, she is writing an anti-oppressive, hybrid-genre textbook on academic writing and pedagogy, tentatively titled (De)Constructing Academic Writing: An Experimental Critical Approach to Advanced Composition.

Endnotes

1. Baran Germen, “Abjectly Melodramatic: The Monstrous Body and the Queer Politics of Are We OK?,” Queer Studies in Media and Popular Culture 2:3 (2017), 339–351.

2. Jenée Wilde, “Dimensional Sexuality: Exploring New Frameworks for Bisexual Desires,” Sexual and Relationship Therapy 29:3 (2014), 320–338; Jenée Wilde, “Gay, Queer, or Dimensional? Modes of Reading Sexuality on Torchwood,” Journal of Bisexuality 15:3 (2015), 414–434.