Esra Mirze Santesso

Esra Mirze Santesso is Associate Professor of English. Her research interests include postcolonial theory, contemporary British novel, Anglophone fiction, human rights narratives, and Muslim identity. 

Esra Mirze Santesso received her B.A. from Bogazici University in Istanbul, Turkey, and her Ph.D. from the University of Nevada. She specializes in postcolonial theory and literature with an emphasis on diasporic and immigrant narratives. Her book, Disorientation: Muslim Identity in Contemporary Anglophone Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) investigates the extent to which the questions and theories of postcolonial identity can be applied to Muslim subjects living in the West. Her book project was supported by a research grant awarded by the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts. She is the co-editor of Islam and Postcolonial Literature (Routledge, 2017), which complicate the representation of the Muslim by acknowledging religion as a significant and complex component of postcolonial identity.

Her articles have appeared in numerous edited collections, and in journals such as Journal of Religion and Literature, Critical Muslim, Postcolonial Interventions, Recherche Littéraire / Literary Research, The Comparatist, and Postcolonial Text. Her interview with Orhan Pamuk was published in PMLA.

She teaches a variety of courses in postcolonial studies. One of her graduate seminars (ENGL 6695: Religion and Postcolonial Literature) received a Curriculum Internationalization Grant from UGA in 2012, which allowed her to organize a trip to Al-Farooq Mesjid to talk about the experiences of Muslim minorities living in metro Atlanta. Her other graduate seminar (ENGL 6685: Human Rights and Postcolonial Literature) included a trip to the Carter Center and the National Center for Civil and Human Rights in Atlanta.