Photograph by Jakub Goldmann
PhDr. Petr Kučera, PhD teaches Ottoman and Turkish literature, Turkish language, and modern Turkish history. He has completed long-term research stays at Freie Universität Berlin (2001–2002), Ankara University (2003–2004), Boğaziçi University (2005–2006), and Princeton University (2006–2007). He also served as a researcher at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London (2010–2011) and at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich (2014). From 2016 to 2021, he was an assistant professor of Turkish studies at the University of Hamburg; since 2021, he has been a full professor of Turkish literature at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz. From Turkish, he has translated, among other works, 10 novels by Orhan Pamuk and authored A Comprehensive Grammar of Turkish (2014) and From Istanbul to the End of the World: Ottoman Travelogues from the Turn of the 19th and 20th Centuries (2019, with J. Malečková).
Contact e-mail: pekucera@uni-mainz.de
(ed.) Becoming Ottoman. Converts, Renegades and Competing Loyalties in the Early Modern and Modern Ages. I. B. Tauris, London, 2025 (spolueditoři: Y. Köse, T. Völker)
(ed.) Selected Studies on Genre in Middle Eastern Literatures: From Epics to Novels. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle upon Tyne 2023 (spolueditorka: H. Çelik)
(ed.) Texts, Contexts, Intertexts. Studies in Honor of Orhan Pamuk. Ergon, Baden Baden 2022 (spolueditor: J. Rentzsch)
„Rıza Nur as a Novelist: A Critical Look at His Unpublished Novel Paçi ile Ançi.“ Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes 116 (2025): 315-332.
„Tempted by the ‘Turkish religion’: Converts, renegades and Turks in the account of a late sixteenth-century Czech Protestant member of the Habsburg embassy in Istanbul,“ Becoming Ottoman (2025), 117-137
„Caught in the Text: Authenticity, Originality and Intertextuality in Orhan Pamuk’s The Black Book and Istanbul“ (spoluautorka J. Chovanec), Texts, Contexts, Intertexts (2022), 261–317.
„In the Service of the Republic: Some Observations on the Kemalist Revolutionary Novel“, Selected Studies on Genre (2023), 337-377.
„Out of Istanbul: Late Ottoman Men and Women on Western Countries, the Arab Provinces, and Themselves,“ Archiv Orientální 89/3 (2021): 615-655 (spoluautorka. J. Malečková)
“The Ideal of the West, the Reality of the East. Towards a New Poetics of Ottoman Modernization in the Novels of Edebiyat-ı Cedide (1890s-1900s).” Rubrica Contemporanea 12 (2017), 19-41.
“Claiming the West for the East: Classical Antiquity as an Alternative Source of Turkish Post-Ottoman Identity?” In: Vladimir Biti (ed.), Claiming the Dispossession. The Politics of Hi/storytelling in Post-Imperial Europe. Leiden: Brill, 2017, 93-115.