Adaptation, restoration, rebirth: 20th Annual Association of Adaptation Studies Conference 2025, Istanbul Bilgi University

The Association of Adaptation Studies (AAS) Conference theme in 2025, ‘Adaptation, Restoration, Rebirth’, found a meaningful venue in İstanbul Bilgi University’s santralistanbul campus. This site was once home to the Silahtaraga Electrical Power Plant, Türkiye’s first urban-scale power plant. Following its restoration in 2007, the site became part of a cultural, artistic, and educational hub on campus, carrying the industrial memory of İstanbul’s modernization period. Silahtaraga’s transformation resonates deeply with the processes of adaptation, restoration, and rebirth. As Thomas Leitch claimed in his talk, ‘restoration doesn’t aim to change what are widely called source texts but to change our relations to those texts’. In this regard, the restoration of Silahtaraga is not a mere act of architectural preservation but a cultural repositioning of the site for new users. Embodying the conversations at this year’s AAS Conference, the Bilgi campus functioned as a complementary space, exploring adaptation and its interventions across forms, meanings, and temporalities. 2025 marked both the twentieth anniversary of the AAS Conference and another milestone of the tenth anniversary of the Palgrave book series Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture, edited by Julie Grossman and R. Barton Palmer. Initially known as the Literature on Screen Association, the first conference took place in 2006 at De Montfort University in Leicester, UK. Since its establishment as an independent charity in 2008, the annual AAS conference has been organized in ten other countries, first coming to Türkiye in 2011 in an event organized by the late Professor Laurence Raw and hosted by Yeni Yüzyıl University, and then returning this year to Bilgi. Attendees celebrated with a cake festooned with book covers designed for the series. A significant contributor to scholarship in adaptation studies, Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture has helped make the field more dynamic, interdisciplinary, and international. This year’s presentations proved the impact of that expansion and demonstrated that the series inspired new directions in adaptation studies. For the presentations, the theme functioned as a conceptual framework, appearing in nuances and interpretations rather than full-on engagement. Papers demonstrated the expanding reach and dynamism of adaptation studies alongside a growing interest in the field, evidenced by the attendance of early-career researchers and scholars from a wide range of intersecting disciplines. The panels took place across three days and explored an impressive range of topics, from AI, media industries, spatiality, aurality, television, true crime, authorship, cross-cultural interventions, digital media, gaming, genre, gender, interdisciplinary methodologies, theories, media forms, and approaches to explore adaptation and its processes. The conference began with the screening of Feride Çiçekoğlu’s (Bilgi University) newly restored, self-adapted film Don’t Let Them Shoot the Kite (1982). Part of streamer Mubi’s restoration initiatives, the film represents classic Turkish cinema and demonstrates the importance of restoration itself. The flexible nature of this year’s theme also made itself present in both keynotes, each offering a distinct yet thematically resonant interpretation. Ahmet Gürata (Izmir University of Economics) and Iain Robert Smith (King’s College London) each acknowledged and demonstrated how the conference theme informed their respective approaches while blending it with their respective fields. Approaching restoration and rebirth as a look into cross-cultural character narratives, Gürata explored the trickster across narrative traditions, with a particular focus on classic and contemporary Turkish cinema. Rather than centring on genre or plot structures, his paper adopted a character-based approach that offered a fresh framework for analysis. Framing the trickster as a cross-cultural archetype capable of illuminating new directions for film and adaptation studies, Gürata identified critical turning points in Türkiye’s political and electoral history from 1946 to 2018 and aligned them with actor-driven comedic cycles, from Feridun Karakaya to Sadri Alışık to Cem Yılmaz. The trickster presents a culturally loaded figure who emerges in popular national cinema at crucial social junctures, a model and a motor for social transformation as well as a vehicle for cultural adaptation. Smith’s keynote, Restoration as Adaptation, seamlessly bridged the conference’s theme with his work on marginal and cult cinema, especially the restoration of mid-twentieth century Turkish films. His presentation included transnational films like Dünyayı Kurtaran Adam (İnanç, 1982), known internationally as ‘Turkish Star Wars’, and unofficial Batman remakes to reframe restoration as an interpretive act rather than a quest for pristine originals. Similar to Gürata, Smith positioned himself and his presentation as not having come directly from adaptation studies; however, his work connects to adaptation by considering reconstruction as an act that aims to re-establish a filmic text to produce versions that are as complete as possible. His discussion of copyright and the question of precarious digital archives also highlighted pressing issues for adaptation studies. In this sense, Smith’s contribution not only bridged disciplinary boundaries but also reframed the scope of adaptation studies to include practices and debates of archives in the digital age. Ultimately, both keynotes uncovered texts and topics that may not be readily perceived as relevant to adaptation, while showing they are, in fact, deeply rooted in the field. Gürata and Smith revealed adaptation studies to be less a closed discipline than a site of exchange, one that continuously reshapes itself, as suggested by the conference theme. This year’s CFP posed several questions to expand the discussion of spatio-temporal adaptations explored in last year’s AAS ‘Time and Space in Adaptation’ conference. İpek Çakmak’s (İstanbul Technical University) exploration of the reinterpretation of a historical Basilica Cistern in İstanbul, through the performance art Medusa’s Scream (Cankeş, 2023), focused on the dynamic interactions between space, performance, and the audience. Sahar Hamzah (Arabian Gulf University) looked at how the narrative and aesthetic elements of the How to Train Your Dragon (DeBlois and Sanders) franchise are retold through localized architectural and culinary choices in a Motiongate Dubai theme park. Comparing it with Universal Orlando’s own theme-park adaptation of the same franchise, Hamzah explored the reimaginings of a filmic product into different cultural contexts and narratives in themed spaces. Complementing Çakmak and Hamzah’s presentations on space as a transformative medium in the adaptation process, Ilham Melit (University of Mohamed Essedik Benyahia) analysed a case study of postcolonial Algeria using Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia. Another panel on the third day extended these discussions into symbolic and aesthetic spaces of visual art, literature, film, digital culture, and storytelling. Kim Waale (Le Moyne College) explored the eighteenth-century landscape art tradition, characterized by aestheticizing the landscape in paintings, and its reimaginings in later centuries as a response to environmental destruction. Waale argued that artists addressing environmental trauma in their works is a form of adaptation, noting that ‘repair can be an act of adaptation’. Several papers examined AI and technological interventions in adaptation practices. Over two panels, presenters explored AI as both a tool (Raddatz, Hunter) and a subject (Gray, Yiğit) of adaptation, as well as reimaginings and the rebirth of the Medea archetype in the age of AI (Civelekoğlu, Erbay, Şen, Elsaidi). One notable angle on AI was Madeleine Hunter’s (RMIT University) analysis of online content creators using generative AI tools to recreate popular children’s media produced by major studios. Since this recreation borrows from already mediated, pre-existing content, Hunter framed the AI-driven recreation of existing children’s media as ‘meta-adaptation’, building on Eckart Voigts’ work (2009), and discussed how such adaptation engages with childhood nostalgia. Similarly, Selis Yıldız Şen’s (Ege University) presentation positioned AI as a tool for self-reflexive exploration of storytelling, while Rebecca Elektra Raddatz (University of Groningen) discussed the potential and challenges of implementing generative AI tools into adaptation. One of the most direct attempts to assess the conference’s theme came from Thomas Leitch (University of Delaware), who challenged the conventional binary between adaptation and restoration by proposing a more deeply rooted question of whether it is ethically and physically healthier for texts, sociocultural phenomena, and biological entities to progress, remain unchanged, or regress towards a prior state. By examining these analogies, he highlighted how adaptation and restoration intersect and complicate traditional assumptions about change and continuity: ‘restoration’ implies backward movement while ‘rebirth’ suggests future-oriented cyclical change, and more generally, the prefix re- in terms like ‘reimagining’, ‘rewriting’, and ‘reviving’ reflects intertwined progressive, preservative, and restorative impulses within adaptation. Every adaptation therefore involves elements of preservation and renewal rather than distinct categories, as the adaptation and restoration cannot be neatly separated into opposing, self-contained processes. Leitch’s fellow panellists Eckart Voigts (TU Braunschweig) and Polina Rybina (Lomonosov Moscow State University) followed a different path. Building on adaptation as a complex interplay of restorative impulses, Rybina highlighted how adaptations transform narratives through shifting atmospheres, reshaping affective environments and experiences. Focusing on eco-adaptations, Voigts extended this by examining adaptations as cultural survival strategies amid ecological crises, addressing ethical questions of restoration, loss, and multi-species, such as those envisioned in ecological theory and environmental humanities that imagine cooperative survival and interdependence across species, futures with a focus on the non-fiction book How to Blow Up a Pipeline (Malm) and its eponymous film adaptation (Goldhaber, 2022). The panel underscored that adaptation intertwines preservation, innovation, and ethical reflection, thus revealing adaptation as an ongoing negotiation between past legacies, present contexts, and future possibilities. A highlight of the second day was the True Crime Roundtable. Chair Julie Grossman’s (Le Moyne College) presentation addressed female auteurs adapting true crime narratives and how they repurpose these stories to explore gendered and cultural dimensions of violence. Grossman et al. defined true crime as both a narrative genre and a mode of adaptation, a foundation on which the round table’s subsequent presentations built questions of authorship, ethics, socio-political contexts in transcultural retellings of real events, and the boundaries between fact and storytelling in adaptation. Deena Varner and Fareed Ben-Youssef’s (Texas Tech University) paper explored the reimagined racial and class dynamics in Chanson Douce (Slimani), a French transcultural adaptation of a real-life New York murder that underscores adaptation’s value as a critique of cultural narratives. In another presentation, Aycan Yücel Uyanık (Bilkent University) explored the ethical dimensions of the Netflix series Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story (2022), interrogating the entertainment and commercial aspects in adapting such narratives. This commercial aspect was also central to the presentation of Sezen Günce Yöndem (Bilkent University), where she examined the world-building strategies of the Conjuring (2013–25, Wan) franchise through what she referred to as ‘ambiguous credibility’. Drawing on Leitch’s ‘true story’ label as a form of adaptation, she delved into the topics of adapting controversy and authorship. Bersun Kılınç (Bilkent University) explored the podcast Sweet Bobby (Shannon) and its adaptation into a Netflix documentary, examining how the experience of crime narratives transforms from one medium to another. During the round table Q&A, Leitch’s question, ‘What is the difference between true crime and true fiction?’ created a space to think about the ongoing discussions on true story adaptations. Framing and mediation are central to the adaptive process, and the reception of such stories also plays an important role in how they are told, received, and interpreted. Another highlight showcased the conference location, with the round table Intersections in Adaptation: Exploring Themes from Turkish Literature, Cinema, and Media offering a compelling regional and theoretical extension of the conference’s central concerns. Conference co-organizer Seda Öz (University of Delaware) chaired the panel and introduced her co-edited collection Adaptation in Turkish Literature, Cinema, and Media (Öz and Can), whose entries aim to decentralize Anglophone adaptation studies by foregrounding Turkish cultural specificity, transnational exchange, and critical intervention. Ceylan Kosker Bevington (Bilkent University) explored the domesticating transformations of Dracula in early Republican Turkey, where literary and cinematic hypertexts became tools for cultural re-signification. Defne Ersin Tutan (Başkent University) then addressed Pride and Prejudice’s (Austen, 1813) Turkish TV adaptations (Asi, Aşk ve Gurur), problematizing the boundaries between adaptation and localization, interrogating whether intertextual meaning survives when source recognition fades. Mert Örsler’s (University of Toronto) reading of Aşk-ı Memnu (Saral) showed how commercial, aesthetic, and national discourses converge in the Turkish dizi, a long-form serialized television drama central to contemporary Turkish popular culture, highly and broadly comparable to a television series, foregrounding adaptation as a vehicle of cultural continuity and rebirth. Finally, Özlem Özmen Akdoğan’s (Muğla Sıtkı Koçman University) analysis of documentary theatre (Çağrı, Sivas ‘93) pushed adaptation into the ethical realm of memory where staging archival trauma enacts both cultural restoration and political resistance. Another round table on aurality in adaptation explored how sound reshapes the adaptive process, emphasizing listening as a transformative narrative tool. Ronan Hatfull (University of Warwick) analysed the Donmar Warehouse’s production of Macbeth (Webster), which used binaural headphones to immerse audiences in a sonic world of psychological fragmentation, collective spectatorship and underscoring themes of isolation, presenting a fresh way of adapting Shakespeare by reshaping how audiences experience character, atmosphere, and narrative, primarily through immersive sound design. Marina Bechraki (National and Kapodistrian University of Athens) examined a 1970s Turkish radio adaptation of Sophocles’ Antigone (Sophocles, 441 BC), tracing how the shift from stage to sound alters space, time, and character dynamics while recontextualizing the play for modern Turkish listeners. Cemre Ilgaz Öz (Bilkent University) discussed The Thrilling Adventure Hour (Acker and Blacker, 2005), a podcast that revives the aesthetics of old-time American radio through post-modern genre play and reflective nostalgia that sustains and reactivates cultural memory. This round table showed how aurality offers both restoration and renewal by reframing classical texts, reviving forgotten formats, and expanding adaptation’s reach through immersive, affective experience. The conference also offered participants an opportunity to approach adaptation studies with emerging forms of scholarship, including video essay presentations that brought variety to the standardized rhythms of conference panels. Annie Watson (Nottingham Trent) emphasized restoration through a focus on stylized editing in her videographic reimagining of Bonjour Tristesse (Sagan, 1954; Preminger, 1958 ). Through an experimental film from her practice-based PhD, Watson explored how Cecile’s, the novel’s introspective teenage narrator and protagonist, can be cinematically adapted through visuals, sound, and editing. By reworking footage from the 1958 film adaptation, she layered foley, poetic text, and imagery shot on her iPhone to reimagine the protagonist’s inner voice, blending archival cinema with sensory details. Thus, the essayist became part of the restoration, both showing the adaptation of the novel as well as being a part of the restorative and adaptive processes. Wickham Flannagan’s (Bilkent University) video essay on Robert Eggers’ film adaptations structured the analysis around the concept of ‘tall tales’, showing how editing choices are made visible as argumentative strategies and underscoring the difficulty of communicating these choices in an academic context. In her video essay, Ada Özduran (Bilkent University) defined self-adaptation as a practice that reflects restoration and rebirth, with a focus on David Byrne and his self-directed reinventions across film, music, and performance. Özduran argued that self-adaptation enables artists to stay in active conversation with audience expectations, broader cultural narratives, and their own evolving identities. In this way, she positioned the video essay not merely as a tool for critical analysis but also as a space of co-performance, where creators and audiences participate together in the act of adaptation. The use of this medium brought a dynamic dimension to the sessions, allowing viewers to engage with adaptation not only as a topic being discussed but also as something they were through the form itself. 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