Project Team
Alev Çınar is professor of political science at Bilkent University, Turkey. She received an M.A. in Sociology from Boğazici University; Ph.D. in Political Science from UPenn and two postdoctoral fellowships at NYU in Urban Studies, and at UMass-Amherst in Women’s Studies. Her current research interests include the intellectual foundations of politics; Islamic thought; political Islam; nation-building, modernity, gender, secularism, and Islam in Turkey. She has received various awards and grants including Fulbright, SSRC, Mellon Foundation, USIP, Institute for Advanced Study, and Üstün Ergüder Research Award in Political Science. She is currently conducting research titled “The Islamic Intellectual Field and Political Theorizing in Turkey,” under an EU-H2020, MSCA-Global Fellowship at Stanford University.
Kadir Can Çelik is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University. He received his B.A. degree in politics also at Bilkent, his M.A. in Sociology from École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, and second M.A. in Comparative Social Research at Higher School of Economics, Moscow. His MA Thesis at EHESS examined the police regulation of a politicized public space in Turkey, and at Moscow, he conducted field research in a multiethnic market space to investigate the displacement of non-European immigrant merchants from the city center under intense urban policing. He is currently working on his doctoral dissertation on military culture and masculinities in Turkey. His research interests include militarism, militarized cultures, nation-building, cultural geography, social movements, Muslim anarchism in Turkey.
Participating Researchers
Alev Çınar is professor of political science at Bilkent University, Turkey. She received an M.A. in Sociology from Boğazici University; Ph.D. in Political Science from UPenn and two postdoctoral fellowships at NYU in Urban Studies, and at UMass-Amherst in Women’s Studies. Her current research interests include the intellectual foundations of politics; Islamic thought; political Islam; nation-building, modernity, gender, secularism, and Islam in Turkey. She has received various awards and grants including Fulbright, SSRC, Mellon Foundation, USIP, Institute for Advanced Study, and Üstün Ergüder Research Award in Political Science. She is currently conducting research titled “The Islamic Intellectual Field and Political Theorizing in Turkey,” under an EU-H2020, MSCA-Global Fellowship at Stanford University.
M. Nergiz Altınsoy received her B.Sc. in Political Science and Public Administration from Middle East Technical University; M.A. in Political Science from Bilkent University, where she wrote her thesis titled, “Household Survival Strategies of the Urban Poor in Turkey”; and M.Sc. in Urban Policy Planning and Local Governments from Middle East Technical University, with a thesis titled, “Social Policy in the Urban Context: Contemporary Turkish Local Governments on the Way to the European Union”. Her current research interests are contemporary Turkish politics, urban politics, political Islam and civilization, state, and social transformation processes in Turkey. She has been working on her PhD dissertation titled, “The Politics of Civilization during the Justice and Development Party (AKP) Rule,” where she explores the intellectual roots of civilization as an ideology and the ways in which this ideology has been manifested especially through state policies regarding cultural, educational, urban, and foreign policy realms by the AKP governments since 2002
Fatma Murat Elmacıoğlu is a PhD candidate at the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University, Turkey. She completed her BA degree in Political Science and International Relations with high honors at Boğaziçi University. Murat received her MA degree from Bilkent University with a thesis titled “The Ludic Production of Space: Gamification and Spatial Experience.” She is currently working towards her dissertation on diverse understandings of the concept of civilization in the contemporary Turkish Muslim intelligentsia within the context of urban life and community building. Her research interests include Turkish political thought, civilizationalism, community-building, politics of urban space, religion, and modernity in Turkey.
Gizem Zencirci, PhD, is currently an Associate Professor of Political Science at Providence College. In 2024, she is a research fellow at the InHerit-Heritage in Transformation Käte Hamburger Research Center, Humboldt University. She received her PhD in Political Science from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (2013). Her research interests include cultural economy, civilizational politics, Islamic capitalism, heritage studies, gender politics, civil society, charity, and welfare policy.
Her first book, titled The Muslim Social: Neoliberalism, Charity, and Poverty in Turkey has been published by Syracuse University Press (2024).
Enes Ateş is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Political Science and Public Administration at Middle East Technical University, Turkey. He received his B.A. degree in the same department, and his M.A. from Marmara University in 2019, with a thesis titled “Perspectives of Turkish Socialist Left to the Kurdish Issue: 1960-1971.” His areas of interest are the history of political thought; political philosophy; and intellectual history. His dissertation research focuses on the civilizationist perspective in Islamic political thought, and modernization nation-building, political ideologies, and literature in Turkey.
İsmail Yazıcı is currently a Ph.D. student in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University and a research assistant in the Department of Political Science and Public Administration at Ahi Evran University. He earned his B.A in Political Science and Public Administration with high honors from the Middle East Technical University. He received an M.A. degree in Political Science from Bilkent University, where he wrote his thesis on the intellectual foundations of modern Islamic thought in Turkey. His prospective doctoral research centers upon the transformation of Cold War Islamism in Turkey with a focus on the role of the Muslim thinkers from the Indian subcontinent.
Ayşe Ayten Bakacak received her BA degree with honor and her MA from Bilkent University, Department of Political Science in 2008. Her MA Thesis examined the change in media discourse in Turkey after the e-memorandum issued by the militray in 2007. She received her PhD degree in political science at Yıldırım Beyazıt University in 2019 with a thesis titled “Conceptualization of Ummah in Contemporary Islamic Political Thought: The Example of İktibas”. Bakacak still teaches at the same university as a research assistant. She is married with 2 children. Her area of interest includes Islamic Political Thought in Turkey, Recent Islamic Political History, History of Concepts and Islamism.
Seda Baykal is a Sociology Ph.D. candidate at the University of Pittsburgh. She received a B.Sc. in Sociology from Middle East Technical University and an M.A. in Political Science from Bilkent University. Her MA Thesis examines the mektep-madrasa (secular-religious education) controversy in Ankara University Divinity School. Her research focuses on current controversies and the transformation of academic knowledges and universities in Turkey in the socio-political context of the Islam-based AKP regime. In 2020, she has received a Fulbright Grant and started her Ph.D. studies at the University of Pittsburgh, where she currently works on the recent revival of higher religious education and the emergence of the “School of Islamic Studies” at various universities, and how these schools contribute to the evolution of Islamic political thought in Turkey.
Zeynep Önal is an M.A. student in the Political Science program at Bilkent University, where she also received her B.A. degree. She is working as a research assistant at Bilkent HPMI Research Lab. Her reseach areas cover contemporary Turkish politics, gender and migration.
Talha Köseoğlu, Ph.D., is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science and Public Administration at Eskisehir Osmangazi University. He received his M.A. degree in Comparative Studies in History and Society at Koc University and his Ph.D. in Political Science at Bilkent University. His current research focuses on Cold War era developments in Islamic thought in relation to the concept of civilization. He is interested in a broad range of subjects including Islamic political thought, intellectual history of the Cold War, modernity, modernization and secularization in Turkey.
Kadir Can Çelik is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University. He received his B.A. degree in politics also at Bilkent, his M.A. in Sociology from École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, and second M.A. in Comparative Social Research at Higher School of Economics, Moscow. His MA Thesis at EHESS examined the police regulation of a politicized public space in Turkey, and at Moscow, he conducted field research in a multiethnic market space to investigate the displacement of non-European immigrant merchants from the city center under intense urban policing. He is currently working on his doctoral dissertation on military culture and masculinities in Turkey. His research interests include militarism, militarized cultures, nation-building, cultural geography, social movements, Muslim anarchism in Turkey.
Interns and Other Participants
Kadir Yavuz Emiroglu is a Ph.D. student in the Anthropology Department at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. He received his BA and his MA degrees in Political Science from Bilkent University. His research investigates how the urban built environment in Turkey, mainly in Ankara, acts as an interface between the state and its subjects and how power is manifested in the materiality of spatial objects. Within spaces produced by the state, his ethnographic research explores how everyday life unfolds under the influence of different threads of authoritarianism. He is mainly interested in tracing everyday life in urban contexts through participant observation, in-depth and mobile interviews, drawing, and story mapping. He has presented papers at conferences such as the Conference of the International Association of Colonial and Postcolonial Linguistics and the American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting.
Ferzan İdeli is currently a third-year honor student at Bilkent University. He has been actively participating in “The Islamic Intellectual Field and Political Theorising in Turkey” project that is conducted by Prof. Alev Çınar. His main research interests are Islamic Political Thought, political ideologies, nation-building, and the Kurdish Conflict in Turkey.
Beyza Çubukcu is an MA student in the Comparative Studies in History
and Society program at Koç University. She received her BA in
International Relations from Bilkent University. She is currently
participating in the “Islamic Intellectual Field and Political
Theorizing in Turkey” project conducted by Alev Çınar. Her research
interests include intellectual history, phenomenology, resistance, and
labor studies. Her thesis involves field research that examines the
transformation of academic labor, and the creation of new forms of
subjectivity in foundation universities in Turkey based on the
experiences of academics.
and Society program at Koç University. She received her BA in
International Relations from Bilkent University. She is currently
participating in the “Islamic Intellectual Field and Political
Theorizing in Turkey” project conducted by Alev Çınar. Her research
interests include intellectual history, phenomenology, resistance, and
labor studies. Her thesis involves field research that examines the
transformation of academic labor, and the creation of new forms of
subjectivity in foundation universities in Turkey based on the
experiences of academics.
Seydi Şeker is currently a senior student in the Political Science and Public Administration Department at Bilkent University. His main interests are Islamism in Turkey during and after the Cold War and its intellectual roots, the relation between literature and politics, and political theory. He has participated in “The Islamic Intellectual Field and Political Theorizing in Turkey” project in 2021 as an intern. His internship report, titled, “Emek ve Adalet Platformu and Possibilities of Islamo-leftism”, focuses on the articles in the Emek ve Adalet Platformu’s (Labor and Justice Platform) website and discusses the Islamo-leftist standpoint of the platform.
Buket Çatalkaya is a junior student in the Political Science and Public Administration Department at Bilkent University. She had been a part of “The Islamic Intellectual Field and Political Theorising in Turkey” project that is conducted by Prof. Alev Çınar between June ‑ September 2021. Her research paper was about women and modernism critics in the Turkish Cinema Journal “Hayal Perdesi” published by Science and Art Foundation BISAV. Her main research areas are film studies, sociology, and media.
Elif Asude Kaplan is a 3rd-year student at Bilkent University in the Political Science Department. Her main areas of interest are authoritarianism, Political Science theories, comparative Political Science, and gender politics. She has been a part of “The Islamic Intellectual Field and Political Theorizing in Turkey” since January 2021 as an intern. Her research paper was on the book “Men in Islam” by Islamic intellectual Emine Şenlikoğlu which focused on gender roles from the Islamic perspective.
Hande Çiçek is currently a senior student at the Department of Political Science and Public Administration at Bilkent University. She participated in “The Islamic Intellectual Field and Political Theorizing in Turkey” project in the 2021 Summer as an intern. Her internship report was on “The Women and Democracy Association (KADEM),” which examined the platform’s prominent publications and events. Her research interests include gender in anthropology, ethnic and religious minorities, immigration, and media.
