About Dilek
Born and raised in Turkey, Dilek is a first-generation college graduate who earned her B.A. in Philosophy from Boğaziçi University in Istanbul. She moved to the United States in 2004 to attend graduate school in Philosophy at DePaul University. She currently works as an Associate Professor of Philosophy and Affiliated Faculty of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Emory University in Atlanta, GA, where she is known as “Dr. H.”
Dilek’s interdisciplinary writing and teaching focus on questions of politics, culture, gender, and race from a historical perspective. She has expertise on the 18th Century Enlightenment thought in the Atlantic (especially Kant) as well as on contemporary social and political theory in the U.S. and Turkey.
Since 2020, Dilek has turned to creative fiction and nonfiction, with the help of workshops classes at VONA (Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation), The Op-Ed Project, and The Shipman Agency. Currently, she is working on a few things: a historical play; an essay collection on political freedom; and a multidisciplinary exhibit on James Baldwin’s “Turkish Decade” (1961-1971).
Dilek is an avid reader, especially of speculative and science fiction, queer YA fantasy novels, and creative nonfiction. As she will tell you on the first day of classes, she also likes smart TV shows (her favorite of all time is Buffy the Vampire Slayer), philosophy and/or cat memes, and yoga.