Zeynep Anli is an external PhD candidate at Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society (LUCAS). Her current research focuses on the intersection of utopian/dystopian literature of the 20th and 21st century written by female authors, postcolonial literature and European colonial enterprise. Working closely with gynocritical and literary studies perspectives, she studies the connections between all-female utopian/dystopian novels and colonial narratives. She specifically searches for the traces of links between discovery narratives, border relations, matriarchal institutions and biopolitics, making use of close reading analysis rooted mainly in theoretical tools of utopian, gender and postcolonial studies. Her research covers novels written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Leigh Richards, Nicola Griffith and Suzy McKee Charnas, among other female writers who created lesbian, heterosexual or asexual separatist utopian/dystopian lands written in English.
Zeynep is developing her dissertation with her supervisor Prof.dr. Ernst van Alphen, and her co-supervisor Dr. Liesbeth Minnard. Previously, she earned her BA degree in the department of English Language and Literature at Hacettepe University, Turkey, and her MA degree in the department of Comparative Literature at Istanbul Bilgi University, Turkey, where she had the privilege of working with Prof.dr. Jale Parla, as well as taking extensive courses on literary theory, cultural studies and philosophy. In her MA thesis, titled “It is a Woman’s World: Gender Politics of Gynotopian Novels”, she worked on Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Female Man by Joanna Russ and The Cleft by Doris Lessing and researched the representation of gender roles in gynotopian literature.
