Principal Investigator
Dr Sertaç Sehlikoglu
Sertaç Sehlikoglu is a social anthropologist specialised on issues related to subjectivity, intimacy, and desire. Her work often focuses on intangible aspects of human subjectivity that enable humans to change and transform social life. She analyses human agency and investigates its creative and imaginative capacities. Currently, she is a Principal Research Fellow at the UCL’s Institute for Global Prosperity and a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre of Islamic Studies, University of Cambridge. Previously, she held an Abdullah Mubarak al-Sabah Fellowship at Pembroke College (2016-2020) and Gibbs Travelling Fellowship at Newnham College (2019), Cambridge. She is the editor of several volumes and special issues.
Sehlikoglu’s research summary can be found here. Her publication profile can be found here.
The Research Associates and The Support Team
Dr Fatemeh Sadeghi
Fatemeh Sadeghi is a political scientist and gender studies scholar. She recently the UCL’s Center for Global Prosperity as a researcher of Takhayyul project in 2020. Formerly, she held an O’Brien Fellowship at the Faculty of Law at McGill University. As a renown scholar and public intellectual, Sadeghi has published several books and academic articles in both English and Persian.
Her full publications can be read here.
Dr Sumrin Kalia
Sumrin Kalia is a political anthropologist who studies political Islam and civil society while placing them in the broader framework of political culture. Her research deploys ethnographic tools to explore cultural and social processes which shape political activism in South Asia. Her dissertation explores networks of civic engagement among Islamist associations in Pakistan. She examines the role of imagination in generating expectations and actions for the future. Her publications can be read here.
Dr Mezna
Qato
Mezna Qato is historian of modern Palestine. Her research and teaching interests centre on histories and theories of social, economic and political transformation amongst refugee and stateless communities, the politics and practice of archives, and global micro-histories of movements and collectivities in the Middle East. In Takhayyul Project, Qato develops a study of everyday socialities of imagination in the long century of Palestinian liberation work. Her updates can be followed here.
Dr Layli
Uddin
Layli Uddinis lecturer in history of South Asia at Queen Mary University of London. She completed her PhD in History at Royal Holloway, University of London, in 2016. She is a social and intellectual historian of modern South Asia, bringing together interdisciplinary questions on religion, class, mass politics and popular cultures. She is currently working on her first book based on the PhD, Land of Eternal Eid. Her details can be found here.
Dr James
Caron
[SOAS, Senior Research Associate]
James Caron is Lecturer in Islamicate South Asia, in the Department of History, Religions, and Philosophies at SOAS University of London. He specializes in borderland studies, empire, violence, and the politics of poetic knowledge, embodiment, and metaphysics. His research centers on Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the Persianate world from 1550 to now, and draws on Pashto, Persian, and Urdu forms of knowledge. His Departmental profile can be found here.
Ms Hazal
Aydın
Hazal Aydın is a PhD candidate in Design, Technology and Society program at Koç University, Istanbul. She received her BA from Bogazici University Sociology and her MA from Koç University’s Comparative Studies in History and Society. Her MA thesis focused on the construction of gendered subjectivities and silence culture in Turkey’s theatre industry. She is specialized in gender and sexuality, subjectivity, media studies, culture and performance studies.
Ms Laurelie
Rae
[Artist-in-Residence]
Laurelie Rae is a teaching artist and a museum education consultant who specializes in traditional and Islamic art methods and techniques. Rae completed her master's degree in 2016 at the Prince's Foundation School of Traditional Arts before moving to Istanbul to continue her academic and practical studies of traditional and contemporary art. Her areas of interest are Islamic ceramics, drawing & illustration. She is the author of "Islamic Art & Architecture: Memories of Seljuk & Ottoman Masterpieces".
Mr Alexander Pymm
[Project Administrator] Alexander Pymm is an MSc student on the International Development and Humanitarian Emergencies programme at the London School of Economics. He has worked in the UK House of Commons for the past 2 years, providing research and communications support to Members of Parliament. Alexander Pymm is the point of contact for all administrative and general queries.
Advisory Board
Prof Khaled Fahmy
(Tufts University)
Prof Katherine Ewing (Columbia University)
Prof Andrew Marsham (University of Cambridge)
Prof Humeira Iqtidar
(King’s College, London)
Dr Samuli Schielke
(Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient -ZMO)
Dr Ayşe Parla
(Boston University)
Dr Iza Hussin
(University of Cambridge)
Prof Cemil Aydın (University of North Carolina Chapel Hill)
Collaborative Interdisciplinary Team of Experts [CITE Scholars]
Dr Nicki Kindersley
Nicki Kindersley is a lecturer in black history at Cardiff University. She works on contemporary history and politics in Africa, researching histories of political education and and working lives in South Sudan, Sudan and their borderlands. She is currently working on several projects in partnership with South Sudanese and Sudanese universities and researchers. Previously she was the Harry F Guggenheim Research Fellow at Pembroke College, U. Cambridge. She is the recipient of several awards and distinctions, including a University of Cambridge Vice-Chancellor Award for Research and Impact.
Dr Nazan Ustundag
Nazan Ustundag is a sociologist specialised on social policy, gendered subjectivities and state violence in Kurdistan. Ustundag is a fellow of Gerda Henkel Stiftung Patrimonies Program. Formerly, she held a joint fellowship from Academy at Risk and IIE-Scholar Rescue Fund and was affiliated with the Forum for Transregional Studies in Berlin (2018-2020). Her book The Mother, The Politician, The Guerilla: Women’s Political Imagination in the Kurdish Movement” was recently published by Fordham UP (2023).
Dr Simon Wolfgang Fuchs
Simon Wolfgang Fuchs is is Associate Professor of Islam in South Asia at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is interested in transnational Islam and how the Islamic scholarly tradition is debated and negotiated in modern and contemporary Muslim societies, in particular in the Middle East and South Asia. Before coming to Jerusalem, he was a lecturer at the University of Freiburg and a Research Fellow in Islamic Studies at Gonville & Caius College, University of Cambridge. His second book, In a Pure Muslim Land. Shiʿism between Pakistan and the Middle East, was published in 2019.
Dr Mashuq
Kurt
Mashuq Kurt is a lecturer in sociology at Royal Holloway. His research lies at the intersection of political sociology and anthropology of Islam with a specific focus on political Islam and civil society in Kurdish Turkey and among the Muslim diasporic communities in Europe and the USA. He currently works on transnational Islamic movements and mobilisations, examines how Turkish Muslim communities experience, live and imagine Islam, ethnicity, identity and citizenship in western Europe and the USA. He is the author of Kurdish Hizbullah in Turkey (2017). His publications can be found here.
Prof Lerna K. Yanık
Lerna K. Yanık is a professor of political science at Kadir Has University, Istanbul. She specialises in non-Western international relations theory, history of Turkish foreign policy, politics of space and time in international relations, critical geopolitics as well as culture and politics. Her research appeared in various journals including the Journal of International Relations and Development, Die Welt des Islams, Political Geography, Geopolitics, Human Rights Quarterly, and Europe-Asia Studies. She is the recipient of several awards including a Fulbright scholar (CUNY, 2009-2010), and a Derek Brewer Visiting Fellow at Emmanuel College, Cambridge (2017).
Dr Charis Boutieri
Charis Boutieri is a senior lecturer in social anthropology at King’s College London. She is the author of Learning in Morocco: Language Politics and the Abandoned Educational Dream (Indiana Un Press, 2016) and associate editor of the Journal of North African Studies. Since 2013, Charis has been conducting ethnographic research in Tunisia, mapping out and interrogating the diverse and often contradictory experiences of democracy on the ground. Her project, "Lived Democracy: The Glossaries and Social Life of Deliberation in Tunisia" has been funded by a Leverhulme Trust UK Fellowship and various King's College London grants. Her departmental website can be found here.
Dr Fahri Karakas
Fahri Karakas is an associate professor in Business and Leadership at Norwich Business School at the University of East Anglia. His research aims to build new ways of understanding how we can nurture the human spirit and build a collective sense of creativity and vitality in organisations. His teaching and research interests prioritise designing spirited workplaces and learning environments of the 21st century that are engaged with passion, alive with meaning, and connected with compassion.
His publication profile can be found here.
He is the author of Self-making Studio and is now writing for Medium; https://medium.com/@fahrikarakas.
Dr David
Henig
David Henig’s work explores how people remake their lifeworlds in the wake of dramatic societal ruptures. He has conducted research in multiple fieldsites throughout West Asia and Europe, which has been broadly focused on: conflict and coexistence; violence and memory; Muslim politics, revival and transnational mobility; secularism and sovereignty; postsocialism; charity; informal economies; military waste; and everyday diplomacy. Over the past decade, Henig has carried out extensive fieldwork in Bosnia & Herzegovina, where he studied the transformation of political economy and reconfiguration of religious institutions . His publications can be found here.
Affiliates
Mr Samet Shabani
Samet Shabani is a political scientist and co-founder and chief executive at Horizon Civitas, a North Macedonia-based CSO, since 2017. His expertise include Countering Violent Extremism (CVE), Turkish influence in North Macedonia and broadly the Balkans. Mr Shabani has several research publications and worked for a number of domestic and international organizations as a researcher, expert and consultant with his expertise on the abovementioned topics. His former fellowships include: School of Public Policy by Council of Europe, School for Politics by Presidency of North Macedonia.
Dr Yasmine Moataz Ahmed
Yasmine Moataz Ahmed is a social anthropologist based at the American University in Cairo (AUC). Her research lies at the intersection of political anthropology, environmental studies and visual cultures. She is currently working on her first monograph, which is an ethnography of the state in post-2011 Egypt, through a study of the everyday encounters between citizens and the 'state' in rural Egypt. Her work contributes to an understanding of the ‘state’ in the Arab world through an exploration of its physical, spatial and temporal manifestations of power.
Mr Yeghia Tashjian
Yeghia Tashjian is a regional analyst and researcher. He has graduated from the American University of Beirut in Public Policy and International Affairs. He pursued his BA at Haigazian University in Political Science in 2013. He founded the New Eastern Politics forum/blog in 2010. He was a Research Assistant at the Armenian Diaspora Research Center at Haigazian University. He authors articles and delivers seminars mainly on minority rights and regional security issues. He is also a presenter of the “Turkey Today” program in Radio Voice of Van.
Dr Merve Reyhan Kayikci
Merve Reyhan Kayikci is a postdoctoral researcher for the H2020 funded project Religion Toleration and Peace (RETOPEA). She is trained as a social and cultural anthropologist. She obtained her PhD degree from the Interculturalism, Migration and Minorities Research center at the Catholic University of Leuven in 2018. Her current research focuses on European Islamic heritage and civil society. Her general research interests include Islam in Europe, activism among Muslims, gender, heritage, ethics and subjectivity, race, and diversity.
Dr Deniz Yonucu
Deniz Yonucu is a lecturer in the Sociology of Crime at Newcastle University. She received her Ph.D. in social anthropology from Cornell University. Her first book “Police, Provocation, Politics: Counterinsurgency in Istanbul “ (Cornell UP), presents a counterintuitive analysis of policing, focusing particular attention on the incitement of counterviolence and perpetual conflict by state security apparatus. Her work appeared in Current Anthropology, IJURR, Social & Legal Studies, BJMES, among others. She is also co-founder and co-convenor of the Anthropology of Surveillance Network (ANSUR).
Dr Verena Meyer
Verena Meyer is an Assistant Professor (Universitair Docent) of Islam in South and Southeast Asia at Leiden University. In her work, she draws on ethnographic field research, training in contemporary critical theory, and literary studies in Javanese, Malay, and Arabic to investigate questions of Islamic identity, the role of memory and the formation of heritage, and the transmission of knowledge across time and space. Before coming to Leiden, she received her PhD in Islamic Studies at Columbia University and held a postdoc in Norway. Her work has been supported by the Mellon Foundation and the Global Religion Research Initiative, and published in journals including Philological Encounters, Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, and the Journal of Southeast Asian Studies. Her departmental website is here.
Dr Erol Sağlam
Erol Sağlam is a social anthropologist working on masculinities, bureaucracies, statecraft, and societal violence as well as on collective memory and intangible cultural heritage in contemporary Turkey. He completed his doctoral research at Birkbeck, University of London in 2017. After his PhD, Dr Saglam worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Stockholm University and Freie Universität Berlin and was a visiting scholar at the University of Cambridge. He is currently a lecturer at Istanbul Medeniyet University. He has published on conspiracy theories, societal violence, statecraft, and collective memory.
Dr Kusha Sefat
Kusha Sefat is an Assistant Professor in Sociology at the University of Tehran. He received his Ph.D. as a Queens' College Walker Scholar in Sociology at the University of Cambridge in 2017 and was the recipient of the Best Dissertation Prize, awarded by the Foundation for Iranian Studies (U.S.). Kusha brings Science and Technology Studies and, interrelatedly, the new materialism to bear on historical, political, and cultural sociology, with an emphasis on the Global South. His recent book “Revolution of Things” (Princeton, 2023) explores the everyday material object’s implications in the various forms that social relations take, including domination.
Prof Gregory Jackson
Gregory Jackson is a professor of management at Freie Universität Berlin. His work concerns corporate governance, corporate misconduct, and work and inequality in an internationally comparative perspective. He received his PhD in Sociology from Columbia University, and has held previous positions at the MPIfG in Cologne, RIETI in Tokyo, King’s College London, and University of Bath. His research is published in highly regarding social science journals. He has held large grants from the EU, German Science Foundation, and ESRC, and received several awards including the JIBS Decade award (2018). His departmental website is here.
Ms Kemi O’Grady
Kemi O’Grady has worked as a study coordinator and project administrator at UCL for the last five years. She supported the Takhayyul Team for three years, between 2020 and 2023. She has a strong interest in research projects involving people, in particular, their experiences and opinions. Formerly, she was one of the research assistants for a project on Parkinson’s disease at UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology.