Ege A. Özbek

Ege A. Özbek holds a double master’s degree in English and American Studies from University of Graz and Université Paris Cité. He earned his BA in American Culture and Literature with a minor in Art History from Hacettepe University. His master’s thesis focused on contemporary American eco-documentary. His research interests include visual culture, film studies, photography, intermediality, and sentimentality.

Project: The Manifestations of the Sentimental in Contemporary Political Documentary

This project explores sentimentality as both an aesthetic mode and a communicative code in contemporary political documentaries. It investigates how political emotions are mobilized to forge collective identification and inspire political engagement, through what Rebecca Wanzo terms “sentimental political storytelling” to articulate resistance and build affective agency. This study develops a theoretical framework around emotional truth, generated by aesthetic and narrative strategies, to analyze how these films mediate epistemic knowledge into doxastic common sense, thereby translating data and evidence into authentic, urgent experience. The initial selection of documentaries includes Powerlands (2022), Union (2024), and No Other Land (2024). This project analyzes these films not as isolated texts but as part of a social change process that, as Angela Aguayo argues, begins before a film is made and lingers long after. Blending “on-screen” cinematic artistry with “off-screen” participatory integrity, these documentaries challenge dominant media narratives and address the systemic injustices of neoliberalism, environmental racism, and colonialism. The central question guiding this study is: What are the manifestations of the sentimental mode as aesthetics and sentimental code as discourse, and how do they function to create this emotional truth?

Publications:

Özbek, Ege A. “Fatherhood in the Wilderness: Postfeminism and Masculinity in Leave No Trace (2018).” Diversity: Linguistic, Cultural and Literary Perspectives. Conference Proceedings, edited by Susan Brähler and Kerstin-Anja Münderlein, Bamberg University Press, forthcoming 2025.

Özbek, Ege A. “Narrative, Stasis, and Intermediality in the Photography of Gregory Crewdson.” Journal of Artistic Creation and Literary Research, vol. 11, no. 2, 2023, https://reunido.uniovi.es/index.php/jaclr/article/view/22909.

Conference Talks:

“Eco-Documentary as a Space of Resistance: Environmental Activism in Powerlands (2022) and Wrenched (2014).” Conference: “Environment(s): Literary, Cultural and Linguistic Perspectives,” Fifth Student and Alumni Conference of the European Joint Master’s Programme in English and American Studies May 8, 2025, University of Pécs [Online].

“Cinematic Diversity: Postfeminism, Masculinity, and Leave No Trace (2018).” Conference: “Diversity: Linguistic, Cultural and Literary Perspectives,” Fourth Student and Alumni Conference of the European Joint Master’s Programme in English and American Studies, April 25, 2024, University of Bamberg.

“Fatherhood in the Wilderness: The Father-Daughter Relationship in Leave No Trace (2018).” Conference: 50^th International Conference of the Austrian Association for American Studies, October 20, 2023, University of Klagenfurt.

“The Distortion of Climate Activism in The Telegraph: ‘[T]he anarchy and unreason of Just Stop Oil’.” Conference: Third Student Conference of the European Joint Master’s Programme in English and American Studies, May 11, 2023, Jagiellonian University in Krakow.