Keyman Postdoctoral Fellows
2024-2026 Keyman Postdoctoral Fellow
Önder Eren Akgül (Ph.D., Georgetown University, 2022) is a historian of capitalism, political economy, and the environment in the Ottoman Empire and the Eastern Mediterranean.
He is currently at work on his first book manuscript, A Global Hinterland: Crisis and the Order of Accumulation in Late Ottoman Greater Izmir, an intertwined history of global capitalism, Ottoman political economy, and local labor and ecology. The book focuses on the transformation of urban Izmir and rural Western Anatolia into the site of an agro-processing export complex between the 1870s and the end of the empire. Drawing upon a range of sources in Ottoman, Turkish, and Greek languages, A Global Hinterland zooms in on the everyday interactions of capital, labor, and the environment during the expansion of commodity production and the entangled crises of global economy, empire, and ecology. The book demonstrates that debt, corporal and ecological violence, and dispossession constituted the order of accumulation, subordinating labor and the environment into circuits of capital and producing the region as a global hinterland –an integral and constitutive zone of global capitalism.
Akgül is concurrently developing two new research projects. The first explores the history of extractivism in the Ottoman mountains. It aims to provide an alternative history of the Ottoman mountains as laboratories of empire and capital between the 15th to the 20th centuries. The second focuses on the global history of the left in Turkey during the long 1960s. It seeks to rethink the history of Turkish and Kurdish lefts by tracing their engagement, translation, practices of, and contribution to radical Third Worldist ideas about colonialism, anti-imperialism, and multiple scales of revolution.
Akgül is the author of “War on the Desert: The Militarization of the Sinai and Its Greater Syrian Sacrificial Frontier during World War I” (International Journal of Middle East Studies, 2024), which analyzes the environmental and material impacts of the Ottoman Suez campaigns during World War I. He is a regular producer for the Ottoman History Podcast. Before coming to Northwestern, Akgül taught classes on the history of Modern Turkey and global capitalism at Kadir Has University in Istanbul, and International Studies at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.
2023-2025 Keyman Postdoctoral Fellow
Kenan Behzat Sharpe is the 2023-2025 Keyman Modern Turkish Studies Postdoctoral Fellow
at Northwestern
University. He completed his PhD in literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz in 2019. His dissertation focused comparatively on the poetry and popular music of 1960s social movements in Turkey and the United States. He is currently writing his first book manuscript: Rockers and Radicals in Anatolia: Turkish Psychedelic Rock and the World 1960s. The project discusses an experimental genre of popular music that combined melodies, instruments, and lyrics from the Turkish countryside with world trends of surf, psychedelic, and progressive rock. It treats Anadolu Rock as a window into the politically turbulent and culturally rich period of the long Turkish 1960s, analyzing music’s central role in Turkish opposition movements and the influence of rural and minority musical traditions on urban youth culture. Before coming to Northwestern, Sharpe conducted field research as a postdoctoral fellow with the American Research Institute in Turkey and also taught literature classes at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul. Besides the 1960s in Turkey, his published research focuses on Turkish and Greek literature, comparative social movements, theories of aesthetics and politics, non-western modernisms, and feminist film theory. While in Istanbul, he also worked as a journalist, publishing in outlets like the Washington Post and Al-Monitor and working as a columnist and show host for various independent Turkish media outlets.
2022-2024 Keyman Postdoctoral Fellow
Ekin Kurtiç (Ph.D., Harvard University, 2019) is a sociocultural anthropologist whose research is at the intersection of environmental humanities, social studies of infrastructure and technopolitics, and political ecology. She is the 2022-2024 Keyman Modern Turkish Studies Postdoctoral Fellow at Northwestern University. While at Northwestern, Kurtiç is working on her first book manuscript, Sedimented Landscapes: Building Dams, Restoring Ecologies in the Çoruh Basin, which critically examines state-led projects of restoring and salvaging nature in the process of large dam building in Turkey. Sedimented Landscapes shows that dam building is a central site of governing the socio-material space and enacting state power not only through environmental conquest but also through conservation. By tracing the role of the sediment carried by river waters in dammed landscapes, her book analyzes the making of state, techno-environmental expertise, and rural lives through the governance of infrastructure and ecology. Kurtiç is also developing a new book project on the techno-ecopolitics of reframing soil as a "carbon sink" against the backdrop of the climate crisis and its implications for human and non-human lives in agricultural and pastoral landscapes of Turkey. Prior to coming to Northwestern, she was a Junior Research Fellow at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University.
2020-2023 Keyman Postdoctoral Fellow
Anoush Tamar Suni is the 2020-2023 Keyman Modern Turkish Studies Postdoctoral Fellow at Northwestern 
2018-2021 Keyman Postdoctoral Fellow
Deniz Duruiz is the 2018-2021 Keyman Modern Turkish Studies Postdoctoral Fellow at Northwestern University. She received her PhD in anthropology from Columbia University. For her doctoral dissertation, she conducted ethnographic research with Kurdish migrant farmworkers and Syrian refugees, both in the Kurdish region and at twelve different worksites in western Turkey. She is currently working on her book project, which examines political violence in the Kurdish region and the resulting racialized and regionally divided class formation in Turkey through this migrant labor practice. Her postdoctoral research explores the Syrian experience of migration to Europe with a focus on labor both as a category of political economy and as an embodied everyday practice. Her research interests include ethnicity, race, and racialization, the nation-state and statelessness, capitalism, racialized labor regimes, political economy of war, intra-national and transnational migration, gender, kinship, psychoanalysis, and affect theory. She is also the creator and the host of the Keyman Podcast.
2016-2018 Keyman Postdoctoral Fellow
Sinan Erensü was the 2016-2018 inaugural Keyman Postdoctoral Fellow. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul. Prior to this appointment, Sinan was a Mercator-IPC fellow at 
Most recent publications are “Neoliberal Politics in Turkey”, Oxford Handbook of Turkish Politics, Oxford University Press, (2020) (with Yahya Madra); “Powering Neoliberalization: Energy and Politics in the Making of a New Turkey”, Energy Research and Social Science, 41: 148-157. (2018); “Dialectics of Reform and Repression: Unpacking Turkey’s Authoritarian Turn”, the Review of Middle Eastern Studies, 52(1): 16-28. (2018) (co-authored with A. Alemdaroglu). Sinan is also completing a policy report for Istanbul Policy Center focusing on the connections between Climate Change and COVID-19, forthcoming.