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Presented by the Seminar on Turkey in the Modern World.
Lerna Ekmekcioglu is the McMillan-Stewart Career Development Assistant Professor of History at MIT.
Professor Ekmekcioglu joined MIT in 2011 after a post-doc year at the University of Michigan’s Armenian Studies Program. She received her PhD at New York University (2010) and her BA at Bogazici University, Istanbul (2002). She teaches courses related to modern Middle East, with a focus on its ethnic diversity and majority-minority relations. She is also affiliated with the Women and Gender Studies Program where she teaches courses on gender in the Middle East and North Africa. As the holder of the McMillan-Stewart Chair, she organizes lectures that pertain to women in the developing world.
Her research is focused on ethnic and religious minorities and the ways in which minority-ness and gender interplay. She is interested in understanding minority populations’ negotiations of difference from and sameness with the majority group. She is also a scholar of genocide, with a particular interest in pursuing the links between the genocide and post-genocide, especially from a gendered perspective. Dr. Ekmekcioglu also works in the field of sexual violence during mass atrocities and “war babies.”
Currently, she is working on a monograph titled Surviving the New Turkey: Armenians in Post-Ottoman Istanbul, which analyzes the ways in which survivors of the Armenian genocide who continued living inside Turkish borders crafted themselves a new presence to be able to co-habit peacefully with the perpetrator society. She argues that gender played a crucial role in Armenian ways of accommodating the new Turkishness and that an in-depth look at the Armenian feminism of the time reveals the limits of this project. In addition to the traditional book format, digital media will be used to share the findings of this research with a wider audience.
Contact: Reina Saiki
Sponsors: Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Harvard University
As a Title VI National Resource Center, CMES is partially funding this program with U.S. Department of Education grant funds. The content of this program does not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. Department of Education.