Lisel Hintz
Assistant Professor of International Relations
Johns Hopkins University
School of Advanced International Studies
Spanning International Relations and comparative politics, my research examines how contestation over various identities - e.g., national, ethnic, gender, anti-imperial/civilizational - shapes politics from the international to the subnational and societal levels. Trained as political scientist, I also draw tools from anthropology and media studies to study identity dynamics with contextual nuance and analytical rigor. My regional focus on Turkey and its varied neighborhoods provides numerous cases for comparative analysis - e.g., Kurdish and Alevi issues, political Islam, anti-Westernism/civilizationalism - that also spill over to impact transnational mobilization, foreign and defense policy, and grand strategy-making.
Many of my recent publications and current projects aim at "audio-visualizing" the political science toolkit. These include a study of cooking shows as "gender edutainment" in Politics & Gender, an 11,000+ YouTube video dataset analyzing authoritarians' use of historical heroes and enemies in legitimation strategies in Perspectives on Politics, and research on populists' hyper-mediatization of "Others" in foreign policy and grand strategy in Foreign Policy (monograph project under contract with Oxford University Press). In this media vein, I'm obnoxiously committed to getting political scientists to take pop culture content as seriously as regime and opposition actors do -- I've got an article on rap videos, memes, and graffiti as creative resistance tools in British Journal of Middle East Studies, and a monograph under contract with Cambridge University Press on popular culture as political battleground in autocratizing regimes.
My work on identity politics also includes publications in Security Studies (constraints of nationalist constituencies on defense purchases), Democratization (ethnic prejudice in local-level authoritarianism), Nationalities Papers (holidays as sites of minority identity contestation), PS: Political Science and Politics (blueprint for post-disaster academic solidarity), and Survival (rethinking Turkey's "rapprochements" with Europe and Israel), as well my 2018 monograph from OUP on foreign policy as an arena of national identity contestation. I've also contributed to Foreign Policy, Washington Post's Monkey Cage, Boston Globe, War on the Rocks, BBC World News, and other media outlets as well as to government and think-tank panels and publications.
I currently teach courses on psychology and foreign policy decision-making, subnational diplomacy, comparative politics, protests and social movements, and conflicts and cultures in Turkey. I look forward to teaching courses on popular geopolitics, "tech nationalism" among rising powers, and the role of media in international conflict. Prior to joining SAIS, I was a postdoctoral fellow at Cornell University in AY 2015-16 and a Visiting Assistant Professor at Barnard College, Columbia University in AY 2016-17.
I am also proud to run a Zoom writing solidarity group that hosts 10 to 12 two-hour sessions per week for students and scholars from/working on the MENA region. Following the devastating February 2023 earthquakes that killed over 50,000 people, I created a writing solidarity group to provide community for students and scholars from Turkey and Syria. Seeing the progress group members have made, I expanded the group to include SAIS PhD students and scholars working in/on/from MENA. Some participants have joined once, some over 100 times; some have finished PhD dissertations, some have published articles they've written in our sessions. I provide a blueprint of the group for others to use in my 2024 PS article; I very much hope the model will spread. We finished our 147th week on 20 February 2026. Please get in touch if you or your students are interested!
Click for info on my first book, out from Oxford University Press November 2018
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Click to watch my panel on art and authoritarianism on Turkey with rapper and "Susamam" creator Sarp Palaur aka Şanışer
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Speaking on the Syrian refugee crisis at Cornell Law School
The PBS Great Decisions documentary "Turkey: A Partner in Crisis"
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Speaking live on Turkey's coup attempt with Knowledge@Wharton
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Hosting former opposition MP and humanitarian activist Şafak Pavey
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Moderating a panel on domestic politics at MEI's 8th annual Turkey conference.
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Teaching my class on Turkey and the Middle East at Cornell
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Click the photo for my podcast on Turkey's constitutional referendum with POMEPS director Marc Lynch