Jason Rodriguez Vivrette

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, Jason 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. His dissertation project explores questions of hydropoetics and hydropower in the management of the peripheries of the Ottoman Empire, with a comparative focus on the frontier zones of Kurdistan and Libya (including intersections with hydropoetics in Sicily and the Mezzogiorno). Through case studies bridging a variety of genres (travel-writing and portolan charts; poetry; kısas-ı enbiyâ/biographies of the prophets; the early novel) and spanning the early modern and modern periods (primarily 16th-17th and 19th-20th centuries), the project demonstrates 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.

Jason also 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 (especially Iranian cinema); translation studies; literatures of migration and displacement; and ecocriticism and posthumanism.