Burak Sezer graduated from the University of Rochester in 2015 with an MA in Comparative Literature, and from the University of Cologne in 2017 with a Staatsexamen in English, Mathematics, and Education. As a scholarship holder from the a.r.t.e.s. Graduate School for the Humanities Cologne, he completed his PhD in 2022 with a dissertation on US-American author Thomas Pynchon titled After Maths: Thomas Pynchon’s Poetics of Mathematics. In the winter term 2023/24, he was the acting academic programme manager of MESH on behalf of Christoph Lange. Since April 2024, Burak is a postdoctoral researcher in the department of American Literature and Culture at TU Dortmund, where he researches literary portrayals of nonhuman migrations.
Burak Sezer’s academic interests encompass resonances between literature and the natural sciences, postcolonial studies, animal studies, environmental humanities, and protest cultures, particularly within the context of ecological issues. In the context of MESH’s 2024/25 research theme multispecies conviviality, he will be working on depictions of the relationship between human and animal movements and migrations in literature and film, geoengineering fictions, as well as on a short history of ecology-related protest in predominantly US-American literature and culture.