Deanna Cachoian-Schanz is an interdisciplinary scholar and translator who studies the relationships among racialization, speciation, and the human in cultural productions across post-Ottoman geographies and their diasporas. Her first book, From Kin to Kind (in progress), reframes the history of the human within the racial and gendered formations and inheritances of late-to-post-Ottoman Turkey. Tracing how ethnonationalism, feminism, and species difference mediate kinship, From Kin to Kind develops a posthumanist genealogy of the (post)Ottoman human, conceptualizing a modern, if not quite secular, biopolitics of “kindification” through which interspecies kinship becomes distinction of kind. The racial human is produced through this separation yet continually negotiated and undone by its interspecial Others.
Education
- PhD, Comparative Literature & Literary Theory (2025)
MA, Literary Theory (2020)
Graduate Certificate in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies (GSWS) (2020)
University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA - MA, Cultural Studies (2016)- Sabancı University, Istanbul, Turkey
- MA, Southwestern Asia: Languages, Cultures & Institutions, Magna Cum Laude (2013)- Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia, Venice, Italy
- BA, Liberal Arts (2009)- Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, USA
Research Interests
- Critical Race Theory
- Queer and Feminist studies
- Trans-lation Studies
- Posthumanism and human/nonhuman animal divide
- Ethnonationalism and nationalist feminism
- Literary Translation
- Late-to-post Ottoman world and its diasporas
Current Research Activities/Projects
"From Kin to Kind: Mediating the Human, the Animal, and the Armenian in Late-to-Post Ottoman Turkey." Book manuscript in progress.
“Çüngüşabadoum: The Dictionary of (In)Animate Archives and Tales of Hearsay,” co-written by DCS and BG. Book manuscript in progress.
“On Human and Machine Translation, Normative Gaps, and Trans Possibilities,” co-written with Katia Schwerzmann. Project and article in Progress.
Khanna (2020), by Anna Davtyan. Translation from Eastern Armenian to English. Fiction, 304 pp. In progress.
Selected Publications
Monographs
A Book, Untitled, by Shushan Avagyan. Trans. Deanna Cachoian-Schanz. Austin: AWST Press & London: Tilted Axis Press, 2023.
Edited Chapters
"Dzovar/Zoğar: Conversations on Planetary Feminist+ Solidarity,” co-written with Ayşe Gül Altınay (Forthcoming in volume on (Armenian) Feminist Solidarities, Nelli Sargsyan & Tamar Shirinian, Eds.)
“Finding Place in Exile: Queer Armenian Voices Speak.” In Adak, Suny, & Göçek, Eds., Critical Approaches to Genocide: History, Politics and Aesthetics of 1915, Gender and Sexuality section. London: Routledge (2023)
“Deviations,” Translator’s Afterword to Shushan Avagyan’s A Book, Untitled. Austin: AWST & London: Tilted Axis Press (2023)
“In the (Un)Space: Transnational Armenian Feminist Dialogues Between Identities, Belongings, and Mother Tongues.” In Hrant Dink Foundation, Eds., Critical Approaches to Armenian Identity in the 21st Century: Vulnerability, Resistance and Transformation (in Turkish & English). Istanbul: Hrant Dink Foundation Press (2020)
Peer-Reviewed Articles
“Autotheorizing Race Relations on the Women’s Block of Constantinople’s Central Prison: the Prison Diaries of Vartouhie Calantar (1921)," (forthcoming)
“Cartographies of Belonging: Reflections on Indigeneity and Autochthony,” in Journal for the Society of Armenian Studies (JSAS), Special issue, Indigeneity, 29.2, 1 – 21 (2023)
“‘One Unique You’: Affective Attachments and DNA-Testing as Ethnotechnological Apparatus,” co-written with Katia Schwerzmann. Social Text 154, 41.1, 71 – 97 (2023)
“Dare (Again) To Not Speak Its Name? Translating Race Into Early Western Armenian Feminist Texts,” in AUTOTHEORY: A Special Issue of ASAP/Journal, no. 3 (2021): 607 – 630 (2021)
“Deviations: A Translator’s Notes on Shushan Avagyan’s Book-Untitled,” in Queer Edition: Queering Armenian Studies, Armenian Review, Vol. 56 – 2, Issue 1 (2018)