Kara A. Peruccio

I am a historian of the modern Middle East and Mediterranean. My teaching and research interests include women’s movements, modern Middle Eastern History, the 20th-century Mediterranean, and cultural history. I received my PhD from the University of Chicago’s Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations in August 2020.

My dissertation “Women on the Verge: Emotions, Authoritarianism and the Novel in Italy and Turkey, 1922-1936” is a comparative history of Fascist Italy and Kemalist Turkey. By analyzing novels by Sibilla Aleramo, Grazia Deledda, Suat Derviş, Halide Edip, Maria Messina, and Nezihe Muhiddin, I explored the relationship between emotions and authoritarian gender politics in the interwar Mediterranean. My article “Bad Romance: Toxic Masculinity, Love, and Heartbreak in Interwar Italian and Turkish Women’s Novels, 1923-32” is forthcoming in Journal of Women’s History. I am currently working on an article exploring generational conflict and gender in early republican Turkey.

I received my MA in Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Chicago Center for Middle Eastern Studies (2014) and a BA with Honors in History from Wake Forest University (2011), where I also minored in Italian and Women’s and Gender Studies. I held a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship in Uşak, Turkey from 2011-12.

In 2020-21, I was a Humanities Teaching Fellow at the University of Chicago, where I taught courses on the Ottoman Empire and Women’s Movements in the Modern Middle East. At Maine I hold a joint appointment in the Department of History and the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program. I will offer courses such as the History of the Mediterranean World, 1789 to the Present, The Global First World War, and Introduction to Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.