Prof. Dr. Ufuk Özdağ

Ufuk Özdağ is a professor of American culture and literature and the founder-director of Land Ethic Research and Application Center at Hacettepe University, Ankara. She specializes in American nature writing, ecocriticism, and comparative studies of the environmental literatures of the US and Turkey. Özdağ is the author of Literature and the Land Ethic: Leopoldian Thought in American Nature Writing (2005) and Introduction to Environmental Criticism: Nature, Culture, Literature (2014), both in Turkish. She is the coeditor of The Future of Ecocriticism: New Horizons (2011), Environmental Crisis and Human Costs (2015), Anatolian Cranes: Biology, Culture, Conservation (2019; in Turkish), and Nature v/s Culture (2022). She also translated Aldo Leopold’s conservation classic A Sand County Almanac: And Sketches Here and There in 2013, and cotranslated Edward Abbey’s seminal work Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness into Turkish in 2019. As a “land ethic leader” (Aldo Leopold Foundation’s LEL graduate 2010), Özdağ has launched pioneering initiative in land restoration at Hacettepe’s Beytepe Campus.

RCC Research Project: Restoration Ecocriticism

Selected Publications:

• “Restoration Ecocriticism: From Habitat Destruction to Hands-On Action.” In Eco-Concepts: Critical Reflections in Emerging Ecocritical Theory and Ecological Thought, edited by Cenk Tan and İsmail Serdar Altaç. Lexington Books, 2024.
• “Feeling Like the Colorado River: A Groundwork for Restoration Ecocriticism.” Folklor/Edebiyat 28, no. 109 (2022): 1–18. https://doi.org/10.22559/folklor.2073.
• with Cemal Saydam. “The Traces of Gaia in the Gavilan: Reconsiderations for a Planetary Land Ethic in the Encounter of an Ecocritic and an Environmental Scientist.” MOLESTO: Edebiyat Araştırmaları Dergisi 3, no.1 (2020): 178–202. https://doi.org/10.33406/molesto.670249.
• Çevreci Eleştiriye Giriş: Doğa, Kültür, Edebiyat [Introduction to Environmental Criticism: Nature, Culture, Literature]. Ürün Yayınları, 2017.
• “Environmental Crisis and Human Costs in the Age of the Anthropocene.” In Environmental Crisis and Human Costs, edited by Ufuk Özdağ and François Gavillon. Biblioteca Benjamin Franklin, 2015.
• “For the Health of the Sea: In Search of an Expansive ‘Land Ethic’ in Turkish Maritime Literature.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 20, no. 1 (2013): 5–30. https://doi.org/10.1093/isle/ist003.