• Home
• News and Announcements
• 2025

2025 News

• Keyman Faculty Board Member Shayna Silverstein's book Fraught Balance: The Embodied Politics of Dabke Dance Music in Syria (Wesleyan University Press 2024) is considered a standout top of the field book in dance studies, music studies, and Middle East studies, respectively. The book won two major society awards in Middle East studies and dance studies, and received two honorable mentions for major awards in ethnomusicology by two international associations.
  Winner:
  2025 Best Book Prize by the Association for Middle East Women's Studies
  2025 de la Torre First Book Prize® by the Dance Studies Association
  2025 Kealiinohomoku Award by the Dance, Movement, and Gesture Section of the Society for Ethnomusicology
  Honorable Mention:
  2025 Best Book Prize by the International Council for Traditions of Music and Dance 
  2025 Ruth Stone Prize for Outstanding Monograph in Ethnomusicology by the Society for Ethnomusicology
• Keyman Faculty Board Member Emrah Yıldız's first book, Zainab's Traffic: Moving Saints, Selves, and Others (University of California Press, 2024) received the 2025 Clifford Geertz Prize from the Society for the Anthropology of Religion, and an honorable mention for the 2025 Middle East Section Biennial Book Award—both of the American Anthropological Association.
• Turkish language student Marco Kırdar won the American Association of Teachers of Turkish Languages Redhouse Award for Best Progress in Turkish. 
• The 2024-2025 KMTS Annual Newsletter  is out now!
• FALL 2025 EVENT CALENDAR: 
  
• CALL FOR APPLICATIONS: CEST Symposium 2025/2026 | L’Orientale University, Naples | 14–16 January 2026
  

  Who Owns the Nation? Imperial Imaginaries and Cultural Resistance in Contemporary Turkey

• 2024-2026 KMTS Postdoctoral Fellow Önder Eren Akgül will be teaching a course this Fall titled HISTORY 300-0-26: HISTORY OF CAPITALISM IN THE MIDDLE EAST. 
• Ulaş Erdoğdu, KMTS Graduate Student, and his article "Democratization, Foreign Military Intervention, and Rebel Fragmentation in Civil War: Evidence from the PKK Insurgency in Turkey," Journal of Global Security Studies, Volume 9, Issue 4, December 2024, has won the 2024 Best Article Award in Kurdish Studies, given by the Kurdish Political Studies Program at the University of Central Florida!
• FEB. 19, 2025: Ayhan Hulagu Makes the Puppets Come Alive at Karagoz Theater Company Event! 
  
• CALL FOR APPLICATIONS: CEST Summer School- University of Turin, 24-31 Aug. 2025 "Turkey's Culture Wars- Culture, Politics, and Society Under Autocratization" 

September 2025

March 2025