Kader Konuk is a comparatist with expertise in the literary and cultural history of migration and exile. She is professor of German literature at the Technical University Dortmund. Between 2014–2023, she was professor of Turkish literary and cultural studies at the University Duisburg-Essen and between 2001–2013 an assistant professor and, subsequently, associate professor of comparative literature and German studies at the University of Michigan. In 2022, she was made honorary professor of the Research School of Humanities & Arts at the Australian National University. Her research focuses on ethnic and religious communities in the Ottoman Empire, Germany, and Turkey, and examines discourses, cultural practices, and disciplinary formations that are shaped by travel, migration, and exile.

In 2017, she co-founded Academy in Exile, a third-party- funded fellowship program that has offered 78 scholars-at-risk from 15 different countries fellowships to resume their research in Germany. She currently serves on the board of the Consortium for Humanities Centers and Institutes.

Her monograph, East West Mimesis: Auerbach in Turkey (Stanford UP 2010), for example, investigates the relationship between German-Jewish exile and the modernization of the humanities in Turkey. East West Mimesis won the annual prizes for the best book in both of my disciplines—it was selected for the René Wellek Prize by the American Comparative Literature Association and received the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) award from the German Studies Association.