Keyman Postdoctoral Fellows: Keyman Modern Turkish Studies Program

Home
Our Scholars
Postdoctoral Fellows

Keyman Postdoctoral Fellows

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 anoush suni University. She earned her PhD in anthropology from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2019. For her doctoral dissertation, entitled “Palimpsests of Violence: Ruination and the Politics of Memory in Anatolia,” she spent over two years (2015-2017) in the region of Van, in southeastern Turkey, conducting ethnographic research. She is currently working on her book project, which investigates questions of memory and the material legacies of state violence in the region of Van with a focus on the historic Armenian and contemporary Kurdish communities. Prior to coming to Northwestern, she was a Manoogian Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Armenian Studies Program and the Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. Her research interests include state and intercommunal violence, memory, materiality and landscape, cultural heritage, space and place, and political and historical anthropology in Turkey, Armenia, Kurdistan, and the broader Middle East.

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 sinan erensu Istanbul Policy Center in 2019-2020, working on energy democracy and renewable energy cooperatives. He earned his Ph.D. degree in sociology at the University of Minnesota in 2016 and his M.Phil degree in sociology at Cambridge University in 2006. Titled "Fragile Energy: Power, Nature and Politics of Infrastructure in the 'New Turkey', " his dissertation explores the political work energy infrastructures do in the twenty-first century Turkey. His research and teaching interests include political ecology and political economy, urban and rural studies, energy infrastructures and the politics of dispossession. His interests lie in the areas of political sociology, critical development studies, urban and rural theory, and political ecology with a particular focus on energy infrastructures and water/energy nexus. His regional focus is the Turkish Black Sea coast.

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.