Serkan Delice

Biography

Dr Serkan Delice is Lecturer and Research Coordinator in the Cultural and Historical department at London College of Fashion. Having gained a BA in Western Languages and Literatures and an MA in Critical and Cultural Studies from Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, he taught as a Teaching Assistant in the Department of Sociology at Istanbul Bilgi University.

Serkan was awarded full-time funding for three years by University of the Arts London to research his doctoral thesis at LCF, where he also taught a range of full-time and part-time undergraduate courses in cultural and historical studies. He completed his PhD in 2015. Currently, he is working on a number of projects for publication whilst continuing to teach a range of undergraduate courses including ‘Fashion and Consumer Culture’, ‘Global Cultures’, ‘The Production of Fashion’ and ‘Introduction to Cultural and Historical Studies’. He is also a final year undergraduate dissertation supervisor.


My research is concerned with the connections between fashion and politics. I explore these connections through three concurrent research projects: First, I analyse fashion media discourses on the subject of cultural appropriation in their relationship to new forms of racial and emotional capitalism, white supremacy and cultural imperialism. The first output of this research was a presentation at the Barbican on the work of Jean Paul Gaultier.

The second output was a keynote lecture I gave at Central Saint Martins as a part of the 'Fashion, Race and Cultural Appropriation' conference. Second, I will investigate the centrality of fashion production/consumption to political dissidence, immigration and the refugee movements in contemporary Turkey. This will involve an ethnographic study of garment ateliers in Istanbul.

Third, I will examine the relationships between masculinity, male homosexuality and social and sartorial transgression in early modern Ottoman and contemporary Turkish society. The first output was an extensive collection of essays on queer culture and dissidence in Turkey (in Turkish, co-edited with Dr Cuneyt Cakirlar from Nottingham Trent University). The second output was my PhD thesis ‘The Janissaries and Their Bedfellows: Masculinity and Male Homosexuality in Early Modern Ottoman Istanbul, 1500-1826’, which I will publish as a monograph.