Gülsüm Aküzüm, MA

Gülsüm Aküzüm studied English Language and Literature at Ege University in Turkey and completed a joint Erasmus Mundus MA in Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Łódź and the University of Oviedo. Her MA thesis, titled “Multispecies Representation and Entanglements in Jeanette Winterson's The Stone Gods”, offers an ecofeminist and multispecies reading of the novel, highlighting species interconnection and reimagining future more-than-human relations. She is currently a doctoral student in the Environment and Society program at the Rachel Carson Center. Her research focuses on more-than-human agency in climate fiction, with an emphasis on ecological collapse, adaptation, and resilience. She draws inspiration from ecofeminism, posthumanism, and multispecies studies.

Beyond academia, she explores human–environment relationships through ceramics and photography, and brings experience from environmental NGOs, developing research and projects with social and ecological impact. She is also interested in collaborative, interdisciplinary research-art practices around environmental rethinking. Recently, she has been an active member of the Speculative Fictions Research Group in Istanbul, which brings together scholars from diverse backgrounds to conduct interdisciplinary research on speculative fiction.