Aycan Akçamete

Aycan Akçamete is a core faculty member in Comparative Literature and Theatre Arts at the University of Oregon. Her research lies at the intersection of theatre and performance studies, comparative literature, and Middle East studies. Broadly speaking, she investigates how theatrical meaning is co-created through performances, criticism, translation, and other forms of cultural mediation, rethinking the theatre event as a network of artistic, institutional, and public practices. Her scholarship is especially concerned with intercultural theatre, diaspora, political theatre, human rights, and the transnational circulation of performance between Southwest Asia and Europe.

Her current book project, The Public Life of Performance: Networks, Criticism, and Intercultural Events at London's Arcola Theatre, examines the public lives of three Türkiye-related intercultural performances at London's Arcola Theatre, a Turkish-Kurdish diasporic theatre. Centralizing critics and their texts, the project traces the networks of critics through actors such as institutions, political discourses, and cultural assumptions, through which these performances are constituted as public events. In doing so, the book challenges approaches that treat criticism primarily as a record of reception, positioning critics and their paratexts as constitutive parts of the theatrical event. It offers a networked model for understanding how intercultural performances emerge and acquire meaning in the public sphere amid shifting political, theatrical, and critical landscapes.

Aycan's scholarship has appeared in journals, including Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, with additional work forthcoming in an edited volume on censorship, gender, and resilience in Turkish theatre. She completed the first Turkish translation of Hans-Thies Lehmann's Postdramatic Theatre, extending one of the foundational texts of contemporary performance theory to Turkish-speaking readers. 

Committed to collaborative scholarship and public humanities, Aycan serves as co-editor for performance reviews at Arab Stages and is a core member of the MENA Theater Makers Alliance Educators Circle. She previously served as a core member of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) Focus Group at ATHE and currently co-convenes the Theatre Criticism Working Group at ASTR. Her recent public writing and collaborative projects advocate for more inclusive approaches to theatre history, pedagogy, and criticism.

Before joining the University of Oregon, she earned her PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Texas at Austin, where she received the Maxine Hairston Prize for Excellence in Teaching and numerous fellowships supporting her research. Prior to her doctoral studies, she taught at Istanbul Technical University and worked extensively as a theatre reviewer and journalist in Türkiye. 

At the University of Oregon, she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in world drama, theatre and performance theory, and theatre history. Her courses introduce students to theatre and performance traditions from across cultures while encouraging them to think comparatively about theatre, literature, and performance. Combining critical inquiry with embodied learning, her classes incorporate performance-based exercises that invite students to engage with theatrical concepts through practice, as well as analysis. 

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