Ipek Sahinler is a researcher of queer(ing) narratives written in Turkish and Spanish, and a doctoral student of Comparative Literature at the University of Texas at Austin, where she teaches rhetoric and writing. Originally a translator from Istanbul who has worked with romance languages, her scholarship emerges from Queer Hispanic Studies to seek new perspectives on the Middle East, with the goal of developing queer studies in Turkey both as a methodology and as a new form of critical engagement within literary texts and other forms of cultural production. In 2017, she received her MSc degree in Comparative Literature from the University of Edinburgh. Her current doctoral research is about the intersections between 20th century Middle Eastern and Latin American Literatures from the perspective of queer theory. Alongside her studies, she delivers seminars in different cultural venues of Istanbul about what she conceptualizes as “queer Turkish literature.”