I am an Assistant Professor of International Relations at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies. I received my Ph.D. in Political Science from George Washington University. Following a postdoctoral fellowship at Cornell University's Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies in AY 2015-16, last year I was a Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science at Barnard College, Columbia University.
Bridging the fields of International Relations and Comparative Politics, my research investigates how contestation over various forms of identity (e.g. ethnic, religious, gender, regional) spills over from domestic politics to shape, and be shaped by, domestic politics and foreign policy. My regional focus in on Turkey and its Europe, Eurasian, and Middle Eastern neighborhoods. I incorporate many pop culture and social media sources and participant observation into my data analysis in order best to capture the various, especially vernacular, discourses on identity present in my cases.
Bridging the fields of International Relations and Comparative Politics, my research investigates how contestation over various forms of identity (e.g. ethnic, religious, gender, regional) spills over from domestic politics to shape, and be shaped by, domestic politics and foreign policy. My regional focus in on Turkey and its Europe, Eurasian, and Middle Eastern neighborhoods. I incorporate many pop culture and social media sources and participant observation into my data analysis in order best to capture the various, especially vernacular, discourses on identity present in my cases.
Fatih Mosque in Istanbul
My first book, published by Oxford University Press and entitled Identity Politics Inside Out: National Identity Contestation and Foreign Policy in Turkey, draws on 18 months of fieldwork across Turkey I conducted while based as a Visiting Research Fellow at Bilkent University in Ankara. Using Turkey as an empirical window into broader links between identity and international relations, I develop an "inside out" theory of identity contestation to account for how the contours of debates over national identity change over time, and the conditions under which these debates spill over into foreign policy. Using data I gathered from a wide array of sources including pop culture texts, I employ intertextual analysis to identify competing proposals for national identity present in Turkey, and process tracing to identify shifts in foreign policy initiatives, as well as the discourses that both reflect and shape identity politics. My current book project, under contract with Cambridge University Press. builds on this research to examine state-society struggles in Turkey through the lens of pop culture.
Teaching on Turkey and the Middle East at Cornell
While focused on my research agenda, I am equally dedicated to and inspired by teaching. At Johns Hopkins SAIS I have taught courses on Psychology and Decision-Making in Foreign Policy, Politics of Protest in Europe and Eurasia, Conflicts and Cultures in Contemporary Turkey, and Comparative Politics. Prior to joining the faculty at SAIS, I also accumulated experience as both instructor and teaching assistant at a wide variety of institutions including Cornell University, Barnard College of Columbia University, George Washington University, Bilkent University (Ankara), and the University of Kent's Brussels School of International Studies.
Click the photo for my live BBC World News interview on Turkey's attempted coup
Finally, I am committed to engaging broader communities in conversations on Turkey's domestic politics and foreign policy, particularly given the recent turbulence in both arenas. While at Cornell I participated on several panels on the Syrian refugee crisis, the Kurdish conflict, and the fight against ISIS, and spoke via media outlets such as BBC World News (photo left). I have also given talks on developments in Turkey and its region to audiences from New York to Ankara to Oxford. I have written numerous articles for Foreign Policy, The Washington Post (Monkey Cage blog), The Boston Globe, and Hürriyet Daily News (Turkey's largest English-language newspaper), and have published articles in British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Nationalities Papers, European Journal of International Relations, Survival, International Journal of Turkish Studies, Project on Middle East Political Science, and Turkish Policy Quarterly.
Click the photo to read two of my pieces on Turkey in #30 of the Project on Middle East Political Science Briefings