Hello Visitor!

Welcome to my website! I’m Merve Özçelik, a PhD candidate in Applied Linguistics at Penn State University. I’m a feminist researcher, educator, and advocate whose work explores the intersection of language, trauma, gender, sexuality, and affect. I ask questions like: How are language, affect, and gender co-constituted in the discourses of oppressed bodies? What does it mean to do research not on communities, but with them, especially when we share the same wounds? How do survivor-researchers navigate the emotional and epistemic labor of studying the very violences they’ve lived through? What does an ethics of solidarity look like in trauma research beyond institutional scripts of empathy and neutrality? How can trauma-informed pedagogy resist the pressure to perform resilience and instead cultivate spaces of collective care, political clarity, and radical possibility?

My dissertation explores what I call survivor-researchers: scholars who study the very traumas they’ve lived through. I examine how these researchers build knowledge not just about trauma but through it, thereby challenge traditional boundaries of objectivity, vulnerability, and care in academic research. This project is shaped by my own experience as a domestic violence advocate, which deeply informs my commitment to feminist, decolonial, and trauma-informed approaches to research and pedagogy.

Alongside this work, I’m passionate about trauma-informed education. I co-lead workshops for English teachers impacted by displacement and disaster, co-edit a forthcoming special issue of TESOL Quarterly on trauma in TESOL, and collaborate with educators to create more caring, inclusive pedagogies. Whether in the classroom or the field, I aim to build spaces that are safer for vulnerability, difference, and collective healing.

Along the way, I’ve been fortunate to receive support from communities and institutions that value research grounded in justice and care. I came to Penn State as a Fulbright scholar, which was an experience that deepened my commitment to cross-cultural solidarity and public scholarship. Within Penn State’s College of the Liberal Arts, I’ve been honored with the STAR Award for all-around excellence in teaching, research, and service, and the Forrest S. Crawford Graduate Fellowship in Ethical Inquiry, which supports my work on trauma, ethics, and epistemic justice.

Before starting my PhD, I worked as an English language instructor at Boğaziçi University, where I taught academic reading and writing to undergraduate students in the English preparatory program. With over five years of teaching experience, I’ve worked with diverse student populations and developed a deep appreciation for student-centered, justice-oriented pedagogy. At Penn State, I’ve had the opportunity to co-teach two PhD-level courses. In APLNG 574: World Englishes and Translanguaging, co-taught with my advisor Dr. Suresh Canagarajah, I facilitated seminar discussions, led sessions on decoloniality and translingual practices, and designed assignments that encouraged students to engage critically with global Englishes. In APLNG/WMNST 597: Language, Gender, and Sexuality, co-taught with Dr. Ariana Steele, I helped develop the syllabus and led sessions on linguistic vulnerability, hate speech, affect, and embodiment, how language not only reflects but actively shapes gendered and sexual subjectivities, often under conditions of social constraint, surveillance, or violence. Across all my teaching, I strive to create intellectually rigorous, inclusive, and affectively attuned learning spaces.

Outside academia, you can find me volunteering as a domestic violence advocate with Centre Safe in Pennsylvania, crocheting blankets, making unapologetically feminist collage art, jamming to bluegrass with my friends, and learning Swedish. 

Thanks for being here. Feel free to reach out if you’d like to connect, collaborate, or just share ideas about language, trauma, gender based violence, and transformative language pedagogy.