She earned her B. A. in English at Bogazici University and her PhD in Literary Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 2009. She is the author of How Istanbul's Cultural Complexities Have Shaped Eight Contemporary Novelists. Her publications include book chapters ("Margaret Fuller: In and Out of the Borders of the Nineteenth Century") and articles ("The Dialogical Zone in Hannah Webster Foster's The Coquette" and "Istanbulite Women and the City in Elif Safak's The Bastard of Istanbul"). Her research focuses on nineteenth-century British and American women writers, postcolonial theory, feminist criticism, postmodernism, and contemporary fiction.