Zeynep Ozgen

Zeynep Ozgen received her PhD in Sociology from the University of California Los Angeles in 2014. She is a political sociologist and ethnographer with research and teaching interests in social movements, culture, social theory, and the Middle East. She has conducted extensive fieldwork in Turkey on religious mobilization, ethnic relations, and minority rights.

Her current book project is an ethnographic and historical study of Islamist movements that use official and unofficial sites of religious socialization to implement a quiet, gradual, and remarkably robust project of sociopolitical Islamization in Turkey since the late 1970s. Her other research centers on struggles over the creation of subjectivities as well as ethnic relations and citizenship in multicultural societies. Her articles have been published at Theory and Society, Qualitative Sociology, Nations and Nationalism, and minor publications have appeared in Perspectives on Europe and New Perspectives on Turkey.

She is the recipient of fellowships from the Social Science Research Council, Fulbright-Hays/IIE, the American Council for Learned Societies, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the Council for European Studies. At NYUAD, she teaches ethnographic methods and social movements.

Education:

• 2014 Ph.D. Sociology, University of California-Los Angeles
• 2008 M.A. Sociology, University of California-Los Angeles
• 2005 M.A. Political Science and International Relations, Boğaziçi University, Istanbul
• 2003 B.A. Political Science and International Relations, Boğaziçi University, Istanbul

Research Areas:

Political sociology; Social movements; Culture

Courses Taught

• SRPP-UH 2211 Ethnographic Field Research
• SRPP-UH 2412X Islamist Social Movements in the Middle East

Academic Positions

• 2016 – present Assistant Professor, Social Research and Public Policy, New York University Abu Dhabi
• 2014 – 2016 Postdoctoral Fellow, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Germany