Esra Özyürek

Esra Özyürek is an Associate Professor and the Chair of Contemporary Turkish Studies at the European Institute, LSE. She is a political anthropologist who seeks to understand how Islam, Christianity and Judaism; secularism and religion; memory and nationalism are dynamically positioned in relation to each other. She is the author of Being German, Becoming Muslim: Race, Religion, and Conversion in the New Europe (Princeton University Press, 2014); Nostalgia for the Modern: State Secularism and Everyday Politics in Turkey (Duke University Press 2006) and editor of Remembering and Forgetting in Turkey (in Turkish İletişim Yayɩnlarɩ 2002) and Politics of Public Memory in Turkey (Syracuse University Press 2007).

After receiving her BA in Political Science and Sociology from Boğaziçi University in Istanbul, Esra Özyürek received her MA and PhD in Anthropology at the University of Michigan. She had since taught Anthropology at the University of California, San Diego.