Jason Rodriguez Vivrette is a PhD candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature at UC Berkeley, specializing in Ottoman and Modern Turkish, Arabic, and Italian literatures. Since 2013, he has served as Lecturer in Turkish in MELC, where he teaches all levels of Modern Turkish language, along with advanced courses in Ottoman, Turkish, and Azeri literature and film.
Bridging the 16th and 19th centuries, Jason's dissertation project takes a comparative approach to Ottoman and Italian interactions in Kurdistan and Upper Mesopotamia (as well as complementary crossings in Sicily and the Mezzogiorno), tracing figures of sea power and hydropoetics emerging in the management of supposedly land-locked frontier zones. Through case studies spanning a variety of genres (travel-writing and cartography; poetry; kısas-ı enbiyâ/biographies of the prophets; numismatics; the early novel), the project deconstructs how literal and figurative manifestations of 'water knowledge' have been deployed as a way to control and exploit terrains and peoples deemed rebellious in relation to a dominant order of the sea. The project also importantly highlights counter-imaginaries, analyzing how the destructive tide of such water discourses has been stemmed, redirected, and/or repopulated through local literary practices. Alongside this project, Jason is also working on research related to Ottoman, Italian, and Arabic literary interactions in Libya and North Africa more broadly.
Jason holds an MA in Comparative Literature from UC Berkeley, as well as BA degrees in both Film and Italian Studies from the University of Southern California. From 2012 to 2014, he served as Co-Director of the Middle East and Islamic Studies (MEIS) program at San Francisco State University, where he also coordinated the Arabic language program for five years. From 2010 to 2012, he served as Co-Director of the Critical Languages Scholarship (CLS) Arabic program in Tunis. In 2016-17, he was the recipient of a U.S. Fulbright Research Fellowship in Turkey, which supported a project investigating the geographic boundaries of Turkish literature as imagined in a nationwide network of literary institutions known as the Literature Museum Libraries (Edebiyat Müze Kütüphaneleri).
Additional research interests include Middle East cinema; translation studies; literatures of migration and displacement; and ecocriticism, extractivism and posthumanism.
Ottoman/Turkish Literature; Middle East Cinema; Translation Studies; Mediterranean Studies; Migration Studies; Ecocriticism, Extractivism and Posthumanism
