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David Gramling received his PhD in German Literature and Culture from the University of California Berkeley in August 2008, before moving to Ankara, Turkey, for his first professorship. His dissertation, “Where Here Begins: Monolingualism and the Spatial Imagination,” proposed new theoretical approaches to literary monolingualism, as it developed from the Enlightenment period to twenty-first century migration fiction and film. With essays on Franz Kafka, Primo Levi, Fatih Akın, Emine Sevgi Özdamar, and Orhan Pamuk, his recent publications highlight the productive conflict of interest between monolingual textuality and multilingual world.
With Anton Kaes and Deniz Göktürk, he edited a sourcebook on post-World War II migration to East and West Germany, entitled Germany in Transit: Nation and Migration 1955-2005, published with the University of California Press in 2007. (An updated, revised German Edition, Transit Deutschland: Debatten zu Nation und Migration was released in early 2011 with Fink Verlag, and a Turkish edition is expected in 2013 with Bilgi University Press.)
He is completing a book-length monograph entitled The Invention of Monolingualism (invited project, Stanford University Press). Other articles under development include studies on: contact pragmatics (CP) in advanced foreign language teaching, multilingualism in intercultural Germanistik, Turkish-German code-mixing, and the undertheorized role of Bourdieusian “field theory” in gender studies. He has recently completed an English translation of the Berlin-based author Zafer Şenocak’s Turkish novel The Residence / Köşk. (Istanbul: Alef Yayınevi, 2008).
David grew up in Central Massachusetts and Cape Cod.
He attended Wachusett Regional High School in Holden, Massachusetts; Middlebury College in Middlebury, VT; the Johannes Gutenberg Universität-Mainz in Mainz, Germany; the University of California at Berkeley; the University of Washington in Seattle; the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin; and the Boğaziçi University in İstanbul, Turkey.
Before joining the German Studies faculty at the University of Arizona, he taught in the humanities program at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey, from 2008 to 2010.
