Alev Çınar

Visiting Professor

Biography:

Alev Çınar is Professor of Political Science at Bilkent University,
Turkey. She received her MA in Sociology from Bogazici University, PhD
in Political Science from the University of Pennsylvania, and completed
a postdoctoral fellowship in urban studies at the International Center
for Advanced Studies, New York University, and a second one in women’s
studies at the Five College Women’s Studies Research Center, University
of Massachusetts at Amherst. She has also taught at the University of
Massachusetts at Amherst as a Ford Associate and at Bryn Mawr College as
a Fulbright Visiting Specialist. Her current research interests include
the intellectual foundations of politics; current Islamic political
thought in Turkey; political Islam; state, nation, and citizen building;
gender and patriarchal statehood; formation of the national subject in
relation to ethnicity, gender, religion (Islam), class; nation-building,
modernity, secularism, and Islam in Turkey; subject formation; urban
space, public culture, and the media as instruments of nation building.
She is the author of Modernity, Islam and Secularism in Turkey: Bodies
Places and Time (2005); co-editor of Urban Imaginaries: Locating the
Modern City (2007), and of Visualizing Secularism and Religion: Egypt,
Lebanon, Turkey, India (2012). Her articles have appeared in journals
such as Comparative Studies in Society and History; International
Journal of Middle East Studies; Theory, Culture and Society; Theory &
Society; and Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. Çınar has
received various awards and grants from a number of institutions,
including Fulbright, Ford Foundation, Social Science Research Council,
Mellon Foundation, United States Institute of Peace, Institute for
Advanced Study membership, Turkish Tubitak Research Grant, a
Distinguished Teacher Award from Bilkent University, and the Boğaziçi
University, Üstün Ergüder Research Award in Political Science.

Research:

Turkish Politics, Social and Cultural Studies