You are kindly invited to the “Adaptation, Restoration, and Transnational Dialogue: Turkish, German, and Russian Cinema” seminar organized by the Department of Communication and Design.
Title: Adaptation, Restoration, and Transnational Dialogue: Turkish, German, and Russian Cinema
Speaker: Seda Öz, PhD, University of Delaware
Date: 23 March 2026, Monday
Time: 12:30-13:30
Avenue: FFB-011
Abstract
My research reframes transnational adaptations not as a primarily geographic phenomenon—the movement of media across national borders—but as an industrial method shaped by socio-political constraints, censorship regimes, and economic precarity. Drawing on my book manuscript The Politics of Transnational Adaptations: Mapping Border-Crossing Acts in German, Turkish, and Russian Cinema (in preparation for Edinburgh University Press), I argue that dominant theories of transnationalism remain embedded in Anglo-American paradigms that imagine cross-border media flows as linear exchanges between separate nations. By examining adaptation practices in Turkish, German, and Russian cinema during periods of political orthodoxy, the research shows that transnationality can emerge not only through cross-border movement but also through cultural distance, temporal regime change, and return after political displacement. Rather than functioning as parallel examples, these cases productively destabilize one another; each unsettling in distinct ways the normative conceptual stability of the term “transnational.” This reconceptualization of transnationality treats marginal and politically constrained cinemas not as peripheral examples, but as theory-producing sites that offer an alternative model for understanding media circulation.
This argument also has material implications and demands a methodological response. Because the cinemas under study are among the most archivally fragmented, part of the media historian’s task becomes infrastructural. To address this, I extend this research into collaborative, public- facing media scholarship. This practice-based project, which received a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Seal of Excellence, will digitally restore two Turkish film remakes in collaboration with restoration labs such as the American Genre Film Archive and redistribute them through restoration-focused film festivals such as Rediscovered at Bristol, so that they re-enter public memory and critical discourse. The project will also create an open-access platform, Moving Texts from Anatolia, designed as both an archive and an infrastructure. The scholarly interface will document restoration workflows, archival negotiations, digital cleaning processes, and metadata creation, preserving not only the restored films but also their restoration history. Integration of historical analysis, preservation materials, and digital access tools will make these adaptations researchable and teachable. In doing so, the platform will offer a replicable model for an interdisciplinary field at the intersection of film history, archival studies, and digital humanities.
Bio
Seda Öz is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Delaware, Department of English. Her research focuses on transnational cinema and adaptation studies, examining how political and economic conditions shape cross-cultural media flows. She is the editor of Adaptation in Turkish Literature, Cinema, and Media (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025), co-treasurer of the Association of Adaptation Studies, and the founding editor of the digital humanities project: Adaptation Today.