Gülsat Aygen

The Department of English welcomes Assistant Professor Gülsat Aygen, who joins us from her previous position at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. She has also taught at Harvard University, where, in 2002, she received her Ph.D. in Linguistics as well as a TESOL certificate. In 1996, she earned a B.A. in English Language and Literature and a certificate in Linguistics from Bosphorous University in Turkey. She earned her M.A. in Linguistics at Bosphorous University in 1998.

She has published several dozen articles in conference proceedings and is currently working on a book. Two of her articles are under review at major linguistics journals.

As a syntactician, Aygen researches inflectional categories in the clausal architecture of English and Turkic languages, focusing primarily on tense and modality in subordinate and matrix contexts. She would like to incorporate this work into developing a web database for the syntactic structures of English and Turkic languages.

When asked how teaching made her feel, Aygen exclaimed, “Awesome! I feel like the whirling dervishes of the Sufi tradition who transfer love from the heavens to the people on earth while dancing: the only difference is that I believe I transfer the pleasure of understanding and thinking. Moreover, getting paid for what I love doing!” One of the best parts of her job, she says, is the students—their questions, their curiosity, and, even better, their objections to what she has said. She hopes to help train outstanding students while working on her own academic career.

Outside of the classroom, Aygen enjoys cooking, cross stitching, and especially dancing—folk dances, classical dances, and, most recently, Argentine tango. She also enjoys reading modern poetry and science fiction, and she enjoys reading about animals, particularly goats, horses, and cats.

Aygen loves being at NIU, and she would like everyone to know that her door is open to anyone who would like to talk about languages and/or goats!

Kathleen Renk

The Department of English also welcomes Assistant Professor Kathleen Renk, who joins our faculty from Indiana State University, where she held a joint appointment in English and Women’s Studies. She previously taught at Cornell College in Mt. Vernon, Iowa, and Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois. Renk earned a B.A. in Religion from the University of Northern Iowa, and a B.S. in Nursing from the University of Iowa. She earned her Ph.D. in English from the University of Iowa where she also earned an excellence in teaching award.

Enthusiastic about her upcoming experience with NIU, Renk is “passionate about teaching and [loves] the intellectual exchange of ideas that occurs in the classroom.” She cites the best part of her job as having an intellectual impact on each group of students.

Renk has several publications, including a book, Caribbean Shadows and Victorian Ghosts: Women’s Writing and Decolonization. Her articles have appeared in The Journal of Commonwealth Literatures and The Journal of Caribbean Literatures.

She is currently working on a second book, The Alchemical Imagination: Magic, Science, and Empire in British Postcolonial and Post-Imperial Writing. In this work, Renk examines the responses of selected writers such as Pauline Melville, Zadie Smith, and Amitav Ghosh to “the conflict between science and pseudo-science, the impact of the Darwinian worldview on the colonies and empire, and the potential impact of contemporary genetic research on the postcolonial world.”

She is also writing two articles, one concerning A.S. Byatt and the feminine individualist and the other focusing on a comparative study of Edwidge Danticat’s and Pauline Melville’s approaches to postcolonialism and postmodernism.

As a researcher in Postcolonial Literature, British Modernism, and Women’s Studies, Renk hopes to develop postcolonial courses in Caribbean and Australian literatures here at NIU. She would like to seek grants to help her in developing a broad Caribbean Studies program that would include study abroad opportunities in the Caribbean.

Renk enriches her non-academic life with a love of music and volunteering. She does volunteer work on women’s issues, focusing on women’s literacy and reproductive rights.

Eventually, Renk would like to obtain a Fulbright grant. She would also like to write creatively again. “A.S. Byatt is my role model,” says Renk, “since she is both an academic and a creative writer.”