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.

Photograph of “Margery Corbett Ashby and members of the International Board lay a wreath [at the] Monument of the new Turkish Republic.” Papers and objects of Bessie Rischbieth, 1900-1967, Series 8, File 12, Reports, notes, newsletters and photographs relating to the I.W.S.A. 12th Congress, Istanbul. National Library of Australia, MS 2004. http://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-3595830453.