In the latest program in the New Books Network’s Middle East Studies Series, History and Middle Eastern Studies PhD candidate Deren Ertas talks with Ayfer Karakaya-Stump (PhD 2008), Associate Professor of History at the College of William and Mary, about her recently published monograph, The Kizilbash-Alevis in Ottoman Anatolia: Sufism, Politics, and Community (Edinburgh University Press, 2019). Winner of the 2020 SERMEISS Book Award for outstanding scholarship in Middle Eastern/Islamic Studies, this is the first monograph to address the social history of Kizilbashism/Alevism. It explores the origins of the Kizilbash/Alevis within the context of cosmopolitan Sufism in the Middle East. Using newly surfaced sources generated from the Kizilbash/Alevi milieu, Karakaya-Stump traces the transformation of the Kizilbash from a radical religio-political movement into a religious order of closed communities. In doing so, she breaks with paradigms that have dominated the study of Kizilbash/Alevis and offers an alternative approach to the study of "heterodox" religious communities in the Islamic world. Listen to their conversation at the New Books Network.