A warm welcome to our newest NMCC additions, Kenneth Hanson and Alican Akyuz!

Kenneth Hanson

I’m a recent graduate of Kent State University where I received by M.A. in sociology. My thesis was an empirical examination of the how heterosexual college students use Tinder and other dating apps as a way to bond with their friends (not just for hooking up). My thesis also examined the different experiences women and men had when using dating apps in their conversations as well as meeting their matches. Broadly, this relates to my larger aim of understanding how gender and sexuality are expressed and experienced in conjunction with technological platforms. My next project is a critical examination of the discourse constructed on The Red Pill (on Reddit). I’m excited to be at the University of Oregon to pursue my PhD in sociology, and to join the community of scholars interested in new media studies. Feel free to email me if you want to chat!

Alican Akyuz

Alican received his B.A from the Department of English Language and Literature at Hacettepe University in Turkey. In 2015 he was awarded with a DAAD fellowship and began his M.A in British Studies at Humboldt-University of Berlin in Germany. Establishing a relationship between relational subjectivity and multiple bodily belongings, his master’s thesis focused on the notion of posthuman of the technologically-mediated world. In 2016 he was a research assistant at the Open University in Wales, UK. Before joining the Comparative Literature Department at the University of Oregon in 2017, Alican received a fellowship from Einstein Foundation Berlin and was a pre-doctoral fellow at Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School of Literary Studies at Free University of Berlin in Germany. His research focuses on 19th- through 21st-century Ottoman and Turkish literature and visual culture, interrelations between medium technologies and westernization in the Middle East, and intellectual histories of Europe and Asia Minor.