I am Professor of Geography and Environment at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. I started to serve as the Chair of the Curriculum in Global Studies in 2021. In the past, I served as The Caroline H. and Thomas S. Royster Distinguished Professor for Graduate Education at The Graduate School (2018-2021) and the co-editor of the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies (2014-2018). I received my PhD in Geography from the University of Washington, Seattle and MA in Sociology/Anthropology from Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, Turkey. I was awarded the 2017 Chapman Family University Teaching Award at UNC and the 2018 American Association of Geographers Enhancing Diversity Award. I co-directed Duke in Istanbul summer program in 2012 and 2013 and Duke Middle East in Europe summer program (based in Berlin) in 2018 and 2019. I serve on the Editorial Board of the journals Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism; Gender, Place, and Culture; and Political Geography.

Research interests:

My research examines bodies, intimacy, and everyday spaces as key sites of politics and geopolitics. I situate my work in the fields of geography of religion and feminist political and cultural geographies, engage feminist and social theory, and use a multiplicity of methods, including focus groups, interviews, visual analysis, discourse analysis, and surveys in my projects. I am fascinated by borders and boundaries and how social difference is produced. I am interested in religion beyond the ‘officially sacred’ and politics beyond elections and state institutions but as manifest in and produced by ordinary people and the ways they make their bodies, traverse spaces of everyday urban life, and encounter others as differently positioned subjects. My research has contributed to understanding embodied and lived experiences of religion and secularism, the production of social difference, and the formation of subjects, borders, and territory. 

In projects with Anna J. Secor (Durham University), we examine the rise of women's Islamic fashion and the production of precarity and fear among neighbors (especially Alevis) in the spaces of homes and neighborhoods in urban Turkey. In a series of editorials and articles, I analyze the embodied, racialized, and gendered politics of populist political movements from Trump to Erdoğan, as well as feminism and social justice. 

Current research:

I'm currently working on a project that examines the role of volunteering and community sponsorship in refugee resettlement in North Carolina. I'm also interested in the borders and migration policy of the European Union  and in the U.S.

I am a part of the feminist geography collective FLOCK.

You can read more about my current interests under Projects.