İpek Şahinler is an Assistant Professor of Instruction at the Department of Rhetoric and Writing, and Center for Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. In 2026, she received her PhD in Comparative Literature from UT. She specializes in queer narratives from the Global South, with a particular focus on modern Turkish and Mexican literature. She founded the reading group called Turkish Literature in Translation, and runs it alongside its adjacent podcast LiteraTurca.

Research & teaching: queer theory, women’s and gender studies, Turkish literature, Mexican literature, Middle East and Latin America, global literary networks, borderland studies, translation theories, archival studies.

Working languages: English, Turkish, Spanish, Italian, French, Latin, Ottoman-Turkish.