Near Eastern Studies

NES Faculty

Erika H. Gilson
Lecturer in Turkish

email: ehgilson@princeton.edu
webpage: http://www.princeton.edu/~ehgilson

I am a native of Istanbul; while studying languages at the University of Heidelberg, kismet decreed that I should be transported to the Pinelands of South Jersey. I was ready to resume my studies in German philology when I found out that thepossibility existed at the University of Pennsylvania of studying Turkology instead. At the University of Pennsylvania, I studied with Osman Nedim Tuna, and did my dissertation under the supervision of Tibor Halasi-Kun at Columbia University. Since receiving my degree in 1981, I have been teaching all levels of Turkish and Introductory Ottoman, at Columbia University and, since 1989, at Princeton.

I have always felt that the teaching practices of the truly 'foreign' languages in the academic setting left something to be desired; thus I have become rather heavily involved in the efforts at the national level to improve Turkish language instruction as well as the teaching of less commonly taught languages in general. My current projects all reflect this involvement. I am a founding member of the American Association of Teachers of Turkic Languages and the National Council of Organizations of Less Commonly Taught Languages.

As a Turkologist I intend to continue researching the historical development of Anatolian Turkish, tracing words and grammatical forms. My interests lead me to topics such as the Turkish language reform movement, its effect on the native speaker and its effect on the development of Turkish; the historical grammar of Turkish; and borrowings across cultures based on the Turkic experience. I also want to know how speakers of typologically different languages think.

Some representative publications:

Intermediate Turkish II: Manual for Individualized Study, Ohio State University Foreign Language Publications 80 and 80A, (1994)

The Turkish Grammar of Thomas Vaughan: Ottoman Turkish at the End of the XVIIth Century According to an English Transkriptionstext, Near and Middle East Monographs, N.S. II (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1987)

"Writing Systems Using the Arabic Alphabet: a Preliminary Look at Two Current Turkic Applications," Turks, Hungarians, and Kipchaks: A Festschrift in Honor of Tibor Halasi-Kun, ed. P. Oberling, Harvard University Journal of Turkish Studies, 8 (1985)

"Introduction to New Writing Systems: the Turkish Case," Languages in the International Perspective, ed. Nancy Schweda Nicholson, (Norwood, NJ: Ablex 1986.)

I have also been the major contributor and editor of the Newsletter/Bulletin for the American Association of Teachers of Turkic Languages since publication started in 1985 until 1996.

Tel: 609.258.4280
Fax: 609.258.1242