Elif Babül is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Mount Holyoke College. She earned her PhD from Stanford University in 2012. She studied International Relations at Ankara University Faculty of Political Science and received her MA in Sociology at Bo?aziçi University. Along with her primary specialization in national and transnational mechanisms of governance and the politics of human rights in Turkey, her research interests include everyday forms of state power and political authority, citizenship and national belonging, and the politics of gender in Turkey and the Middle East. Her publications include articles in journals such as the American Ethnologist, Political and Legal Anthropology Review and New Perspectives on Turkey; as well as edited volumes such as Writing the World of Policing: The Difference Ethnography Makes (Chicago University Press, 2017) and Memory and Diaspora: Figures of Displacement in Contemporary Literature, Arts and Politics (Rodopi Press, 2006). She is the author of Bureaucratic Intimacies: Translating Human Rights in Turkey (Stanford University Press, 2017), a book based on her ethnographic study of human rights training programs for Turkish government workers that were undertaken in tandem with the country’s bid for EU membership. Currently, she is engaged in fieldwork for a project entitled: Oppressive Generosity, Compulsory Guesthood, and the Politics of Hospitality in Turkey. This project analyzes the Turkish government’s public discourse on Syrian refugees by comparing it to other cases in which hospitality emerged as a key rhetoric of governance.

Anthropology

19th-21st Centuries

Ethnography

Gender/Women's Studies

Human Rights

Nationalism

State Formation

Transnationalism

Turkish Studies

Turkey

Turkish (native)

English (fluent)

French (intermediate)

Ottoman (elementary)