Filiz Yildirim read History and French in a joint double degree at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (Germany), University of Burgundy Dijon (France) and Sherbrooke University Quebec (Canada). She went on to postgraduate study at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz in Conference Interpreting with the language combination German, French, English. During her master's degree, she integrated academic exchanges at University of Mons (Belgium), Bosphorus University Istanbul (Turkey) and at Monash University Melbourne (Australia). Preceding her move to Cambridge, Filiz Yildirim worked as a DAAD language assistant at the University of Alexandria, Egypt, taught a Memory Studies paper on “Sites of Memory in Turkey and elsewhere” at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, as well as World History, Theory of Knowledge and German at a German IB school in Istanbul. Alongside her academic work, Filiz Yildirim works as a journalist, editor and translator for Qantara and dis:orient with a particular focus on social, cultural and political issues relating to the WANA region and its diasporas. Filiz speaks German, French, English, Turkish, Italian, Arabic (MSA and Egyptian) and is currently learning Kurdish.
In addition to her research interests in German as a foreign language, Filiz is interested in Critical Heritage Studies. Her work examines how cultural heritage is constructed, contested, and mobilised in transnational and political contexts, with a particular focus on heritage diplomacy.
Publications
- Interview with Burhan Sönmez on violence and his novel 'Istanbul Istanbul'Çakir, Dîlan Canan; Yildirim, Filiz — In: Violence and Literature: Comparative Reflections on Contemporary Turkish and German Literature (ed. Eick, Anna-Lena; Kucera, Petr) · 2026 · in print
- Making Violence Knowable. Literary Testimony and Epistemic Injustice in Sönmez’s İstanbul İstanbul, Sahin’s Alle Hunde sterben and Hakan Günday’s Daha Çakir, Dîlan Canan; Yildirim, Filiz — In: Violence and Literature: Comparative Reflections on Contemporary Turkish and German Literature (ed. Eick, Anna-Lena; Kucera, Petr) · 2026 · in print
Selected Conference papers
- DAAD Conference “Rivers and Civilisations”. ‘Rivers and the Destruction of Civilisations: The Euphrates and the Armenian Genocide of 1915’, Aswan, November 2024.
- 4th International Conference “Fokus DaF/DaZ – Current Trends in Research and Teaching”. ‘Critical Heritage Studies in German as a Foreign and Second Language Education: The Authorised Heritage Discourse as an Analytical Tool’, Madaba, December 2025.
- DAAD Conference “Security, Resilience and Cohesion in the Baltic Sea Region – Perspectives across Politics, Society and Culture”. ‘The Baltic Sea as a Geopolitical Space of Imagination in the British Invasion Novell’, Riga, October 2026.
Other selected activities
- Filiz conceived and leads the Germany in Text and Context project, a public reading series exploring German literature and culture in their wider historical and social contexts. The project is supported by funding from the DAAD Research Hub at the University of Cambridge, 2026.
- She works on KOSTIMA, a research project exploring counter-hegemonic voices in music archives, contributing to the editorial revision of texts for its scrollytelling platform.
- Co-Organiser, with Fadwa Qahiri and Johannes Gereons, of the Arabic- German Symposium „Deutsch im Jemen“, May 2026.
- Committee Member for the DAAD HSK Summer Course Scholarships Selection.
- Filiz works as the Social Media Officer for the German section.
