Hevin Karakurt

Profile

Hevin is a third-year Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature at Stanford University. Her research focuses on Kurdish Literature in its multilingual and stateless condition, asking questions about national literatures, world literature, and canon formation. The 'Kurdish Condition' allows for research into the question of what a literature of a collective that shares neither one nation nor any one language might look like. Currently, she is interested in a Kurdish Poetics of Violence and the forms it takes in various linguistic and literary contexts. 

Hevin currently serves as graduate co-chair of the focal group PATH+, and as editor at Mantis: A Journal of Poetry, Criticism, and Translation.

On April 25-26, 2025, she organized "Kî ne em? Kurdish Literature and Its Studies," the first ever conference on Kurdish Literature at Stanford with Kelda Jamison. 
She is co-organizing the conference "Refusal(s) and Kurdish Literature" with Rojda Idil Arslan, which will take place online on May 21-22, 2026.

Before coming to Stanford, Hevin worked as a research assistant in the research project Half-Truths. Truth, Fiction, and Conspiracy in the 'Post-Factual Age' at the University of Basel, Switzerland (PI: Prof. Dr. Nicola Gess). In the context of the project, she worked on different aspects of docufiction in contemporary literature, e.g., studying the role of documentary devices for narratives of violence and (war) trauma in Cemile Sahin's Alle Hunde sterben. She also co-developed a computational dictionary to study online data on the intersection of right-wing populism and conspiracy discourse (open source). Hevin holds an M.A. in Literary Studies and a B.A. in German and English Studies from the University of Basel, Switzerland. In her master's thesis, she analyzed literary performances of Kurdish identity in contemporary German literature (Taha, Othmann, Ayata).

Hevin has translated the poems of Kurdish authors Sultan Yaray and Meral Şimşek for a symposium entitled "War against Women", which took place as part of the International Poetry Festival 2023 in Basel, Switzerland.

Publications

• "'Schreiben Sie das auf': Fiktives Dokumentieren und die (Un-)Möglichkeiten des Zeugnisablegens in Cemile Sahins Alle Hunde sterben." Colloquia Germanica vol. 57, no. 3, 2024, pp. 243–271. DOI 10.24053/CG-2024-0012 (peer reviewed), https://www.narr.de/colloquia%20germanica%2057,%203-1234-1/
• “Heimat: Malady Without Remedy. ‘Deheimatizing’ German Literature (Othmann, Taha, Ayata).” Konturen vol. 13 (2024), Special Issue: Neue Heimat(en), pp. 36–68. https://doi.org/10.5399/uo/konturen.13.6051 (peer reviewed)
• “Widerständigkeiten in Form und Inhalt. Lütfiye Güzels Lyrik postmigrantisch gelesen.” Kleine Formen - widerständige Formen? Postmigration intermedial, edited by Jara Schmidt and Jule Thiemann, Königshausen & Neumann, 2023, pp. 51–71.
• with Cornelius Puschmann, Carolin Amlinger, Nicola Gess, Oliver Nachtwey. “RPC-Lex: A Dictionary to Measure German Right-Wing Populist Conspiracy Discourse Online.” Convergence, vol. 28, no. 4, 2022, pp. 1144–71. https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565221109440 (peer reviewed)

Miscellanies:

• “Die Kunst Der Anderen. Interventionen Für Eine Brüchig Gewordene Realität.” Common Ground, edited by Giulia Bernardi and Sabine Rusterholz Petko, 2023, pp. 58–61, https://biennaleweiertal.ch/essays/die-kunst-der-anderen-interventionen-fuer-eine-bruechig-gewordene-realitaet/.