Young Scholars on Turkey (YSOT) Conference 2011
Friday, 15 April 2011
The University Club
SETA Foundation at Washington D.C.
The Institute of Turkish Studies (ITS)
Ali Vural Ak Global Islamic Studies Center at George Mason University
Participant Bios
Emiliano Alessandri is Transatlantic Fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States in Washington DC, where he develops GMF's work on the Mediterranean, Turkish, and wider-Atlantic security issues. Alessandri is also an associate fellow at the Istituto Affari Internazionali (IAI) of Rome and serves on the board of the IAI-based The International Spectator. He has held several positions in leading foreign-policy think tanks and academic institutions in Italy, the UK and the U.S. From 2008-2009, he worked in the Directorate General for Enlargement of the European Commission. Alessandri was educated at the University of Bologna, the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) of the Johns Hopkins University, Princeton University, and received his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge.
Ali Balci is assistant professor at the Department of International Studies, Sakarya University. He obtained his PhD degree from the Department of Public Administration at Sakarya University and BA from the Department of International Relations at Uludag University. He was a visiting scholar at the University of Utah, Salt Lake City in 2007. He has written several articles published in journals such as Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, Mediterranean Quarterly, Turkish Studies, and Insight Turkey. He currently works on Turkish foreign policy after the Cold War and relations between domestic and foreign policies theoretically.
Neslihan Cevik is a post-doctoral fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, University of Virginia. Cevik recently received her PhD from Arizona State University. Her research focuses on religion and modernity, gender, and civil society and democratization. Her dissertation, titled “Religious Revival in Modern Turkey: Muslimism, The New Muslim Entrepreneurs, and Sites of Hybridity,” examines the emerging linkages between late-modernity and religion in Turkey. This project is based on extensive field research with the leaders of pro-Islamic civil/political formations including the Justice and Development Party. A previous Fulbright scholar, Cevik has published reports and op-ed articles in national Turkish papers. As a post-doctoral fellow, she is revising her dissertation for a book publication.
David Cuthell is the Executive Director of the Institute of Turkish Studies in Washington D.C. He was born in Manilla and raised in Istanbul and Washington D.C. He attended Phillips Academy and Yale, graduating in 1975. He received his MBA from Columbia University in 1979 and worked in the capital markets in New York and London with Citibank and Morgan Stanley as well as Managing Director of mortgage securities at Mabon Securities. After leaving Wall Street, Dr. Cuthell returned to Columbia and received his PhD in History in 2005. His research at Columbia focused on the 19th century immigration of Muslims from the Caucasus and the Crimea and their role in transforming late Ottoman Anatolia. Dr. Cuthell has taught at Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey where he headed the Turkish, Middle East and Central Asian Studies Program from 2000 through 2004. In addition to the Institute of Turkish Studies, he also is a Visiting Adjunct Professor at the Middle East Institute at Columbia University and is a Visiting Adjunct at Georgetown University.
Nicholas Danforth is a doctoral candidate at Georgetown University studying nationalism and foreign policy in Turkey between 1938 and 1960. Before coming to Georgetown, Nicholas was a research assistant for the Project on Middle East Democracy and a media analyst for Concepts and Strategies. After receiving a BA in history from Yale University, Nicholas completed an MA in Turkish Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. He subsequently spent a year in Istanbul, interning with TESEV and the Black Sea Economic Cooperation while taking classes at Sabanci University.
Matthew deTar is a doctoral candidate at Northwestern University in the Program in Rhetoric and Public Culture and received his BA from the University of California at Berkeley. His work focuses on national identity, secularism, and cultural difference. He is currently working on a dissertation which explores the way that symbolic figures in political speech overlap to organize national identity in modern Turkey. His dissertation is based on fieldwork in Istanbul and Ankara that he completed during 2009-2010, funded by the Keyman Modern Turkish Studies Program at Northwestern University’s Roberta Buffet Center for Comparative and International Studies.
Matthew Dickenson is a recent graduate of the University of Houston, where he now works as a research assistant in the Democratization and Foreign Policy Working Group. His academic interests include political violence, religion-and-politics, and the Middle East. An analysis of terrorist leadership removals that he conducted for the Department of Homeland Security has also been presented to the Department of Defense as well as the Southern Political Science Association. He plans to begin work on his Ph.D. in political science this fall.
Burhanettin Duran studied at Boğaziçi University before receiving his M.A. and PhD in Political Science and Public Administration from Bilkent University in Turkey. In addition to working as a Research Assistant at Bilkent University and Sakarya University, Dr. Duran has taught in the Department of International Relations at Sakarya University and İstanbul Şehir University. He currently heads the Department of International Relations and is the Dean of Graduate Studies at İstanbul Şehir University. Dr. Duran’s research interests include Islamism, Turkish political life, history of Turkish-Islamic political thought, and Turkish foreign policy.
Sarah Fischer is a doctoral candidate at American University in Washington, D.C. Fischer received her undergraduate degree from Iowa State University and has also studied at Koç University and Boğaziçi University in Istanbul. Her research investigates the relationship between religion, democratization, and gender in Turkey. In addition to presenting research at conferences such as the American Political Science Association’s Annual Meeting, the World Congress on Middle Eastern Studies, and the Midwest Political Science Association’s Annual Meeting, she has won a Boren Fellowship, two Critical Language Scholarships, an ARIT-AATT Turkish Language Scholarship, and numerous other scholarships and fellowships.
Ryan Kennedy is assistant professor of political science at the University of Houston. He received his PhD in 2008 from The Ohio State University. His previous work has been published in the American Political Science Review, the Journal of Politics, Europe-Asia Studies, and Foreign Policy Analysis among others. He has given invited presentations of his work on international identity and popular attitudes at the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars and the US Department of State among others. He also regularly contributes analysis for Oxford Analytica.
Selcen Öner is assistant professor at the Department of European Union Relations, Bahçeşehir University. She received her PhD from Marmara University at the Department of EU Politics and International Relations of the EU Institute in 2008. She specialises on Turkey-EU relations, European identity, and EU politics. She also works on Turkish foreign policy, Europeanization, and civil society in Turkey. Her recent work will be published as a book, “Turkey and the European Union: The Question of European Identity” (forthcoming April 2011). Her articles appeared in The Journal of Interdisciplinary Economics and Forum Bosnae. She authored a chapter titled, “An Analysis of European Identity within the Framework of the EU: The Case of Turkey’s Membership” in Christian Johannes Henrich and Wolfgang Gieler (eds.), Türkisches Europa-Europaische Türkei.
Ravza Kavakci Kan is a doctoral candidate at the Political Science Department of Howard University in Washington, D.C. Her current concentration areas are post-colonial theory, Turkish-EU relationship, and Turkish Foreign Policy. She has most recently worked as a project coordinator of the first EU-funded project of Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality. She holds an MA (2008) degree in European Studies from Bogazici University in Istanbul and a BS (1993) degree in Software Engineering from University of Texas at Dallas.
Ömer Taşpınar has received his Ph.D. and M.A. degrees in European Studies and International Economics from Johns Hopkins University (SAIS). He received his B.A. in Political Science from the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey. His research focuses on Turkey-EU and Turkish-American relations; European Politics; Transatlantic relations; Muslims in Europe; Islamic Radicalism; Human Development in the Islamic World; and American Foreign Policy in the Middle East. Dr. Omer Taspinar is Professor of National Security Strategy at the US National; War College and the Director of the Turkey Project at the Brookings Institution. Dr. Taspinar was previously an Assistant Professor in the European Studies Department of the Johns Hopkins University, School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), where he is till teaching as Adjunct Professor.
Juliette Tolay is a doctoral candidate in political science and international relations at the University of Delaware. Her dissertation looks at Turkish approaches to immigration and studies the historical and cultural sources of these complex attitudes and policies. She is a former fellow at the Transatlantic Academy where she conducted research on Turkish foreign policy and co-authored the report: “Getting to Zero: Turkey, its Neighbors and the West.” A French and Turkish national, Juliette Tolay has also studied at Sciences Po in Paris, from which she has received a B.A and M.A, as well as at INALCO, where she received her M.A in Turkish studies. Juliette is the 2010 recipient of the first prize of the Sakip Sabanci International Research Award for a paper on multiculturalism in Turkey.
Kadir Ustun is the Research Director at the SETA Foundation at Washington, DC. He is currently the Assistant Editor of Insight Turkey, an academic journal published by the SETA Foundation. Ustun received his M.A. degree in History from Bilkent University. He is currently pursuing a doctoral degree in Middle East Studies at Columbia University. Ustun has taught numerous undergraduate classes on history, politics, culture, and art in the Islamic World, Western political thought, and globalization at Columbia University and George Mason University. His research interests include civil-military relations, social and military modernization in the Middle East, US-Turkey relations, and Turkish foreign policy.
Ross Wilson is Director of the Dinu Patriciu Eurasia Center at the Atlantic Council of the United States and a Lecturer in International Affairs at George Washington University. In December 2008, he completed nearly three decades in the US Foreign Service, including six years as American ambassador to Turkey in 2005-08 and to Azerbaijan in 2000-03. Elsewhere overseas, he served at the US embassies in Moscow and Prague and was American Consul General in Melbourne, Australia. In Washington, Ambassador Wilson served as Chief of Staff for Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick in 2005. He was Chief US Negotiator for the Free Trade Area of the Americas while on detail to the Office of the US Trade Representative in 2003-2005. In 1997-2000, Ambassador Wilson served as Principal Deputy to the Ambassador-at-Large and Special Advisor to the Secretary of State for the New Independent States (of the former Soviet Union). He was Deputy Executive Secretary of the State Department in 1992-94, managing the policy process for Secretaries of State Lawrence Eagleburger and Warren Christopher, and before that was an aide to State Department Counselor and Undersecretary Zoellick. Early in his career, Ambassador Wilson served in the State Department’s offices dealing with the Soviet Union and Egypt. Ambassador Wilson received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Minnesota and master’s degrees from Columbia University and the US National War College. While in the diplomatic service, he won the President’s Meritorious Service Award, as well as numerous Department of State awards and honors. He serves as chairman of the board of the Institute of Turkish Studies and is a member of the Academy of American Diplomacy, the American Foreign Service Association, the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, Diplomatic and Consular Officers, Retired (DACOR) and the Washington Institute of Foreign Affairs.
Nuh Yilmaz is the Executive Director at the SETA Foundation at Washington, DC. Yilmaz has widely published on Turkey’s new foreign policy orientations, U.S. foreign policy, Turkish politics, energy security, Turkish-American relations, and is a frequent commentator for the Turkish media on these topics. He has served as the instructor for various University courses on aesthetics, critical theory, as well as Turkish Politics in the US and in Canada. Mr. Yilmaz received his BS in Sociology from Middle East Technical University (METU) in Ankara, and completed his M.F.A in Graphic Design from Bilkent University. He is currently pursuing a doctoral degree at George Mason University’s Cultural Studies Program. Mr. Yilmaz has served as the Washington representative for Turkish media outlets STAR, 24 Haber, and CNNTürk. He currently serves as the Washington Bureau Chief for Turkish TV channel, ATV. He also contributes to a weekly column at USASabah. His comments and writings have been featured by major media outlets including Al-Jazeera English and Arabic, BBC, Washington Times, The National, and Foreign Policy.