Principal Investigator
Dr Sertaç Sehlikoglu
Sertaç Sehlikoglu is a social anthropologist specialised on issues related to subjectivity, intimacy, and desire. Her work often focuses on intangible aspects of human subjectivity that enable humans to change and transform social life. She analyses human agency and investigates its creative and imaginative capacities. Currently, she is a Principal Research Fellow at the UCL’s Institute for Global Prosperity and a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre of Islamic Studies, University of Cambridge. Previously, she held an Abdullah Mubarak al-Sabah Fellowship at Pembroke College (2016-2020) and Gibbs Travelling Fellowship at Newnham College (2019), Cambridge. She is the editor of several volumes and special issues.
Sehlikoglu’s research summary can be found here. Her publication profile can be found here.
The Research Associates and The Support Team
Advisory Board
Collaborative Interdisciplinary Team of Experts [CITE Scholars]
Affiliates
Mr Samet Shabani
Samet Shabani is a political scientist and co-founder and chief executive at Horizon Civitas, a North Macedonia-based CSO, since 2017. His expertise include Countering Violent Extremism (CVE), Turkish influence in North Macedonia and broadly the Balkans. Mr Shabani has several research publications and worked for a number of domestic and international organizations as a researcher, expert and consultant with his expertise on the abovementioned topics. His former fellowships include: School of Public Policy by Council of Europe, School for Politics by Presidency of North Macedonia.
Dr Yasmine Moataz Ahmed
Yasmine Moataz Ahmed is a social anthropologist based at the American University in Cairo (AUC). Her research lies at the intersection of political anthropology, environmental studies and visual cultures. She is currently working on her first monograph, which is an ethnography of the state in post-2011 Egypt, through a study of the everyday encounters between citizens and the 'state' in rural Egypt. Her work contributes to an understanding of the ‘state’ in the Arab world through an exploration of its physical, spatial and temporal manifestations of power.
Mr Yeghia Tashjian
Yeghia Tashjian is a regional analyst and researcher. He has graduated from the American University of Beirut in Public Policy and International Affairs. He pursued his BA at Haigazian University in Political Science in 2013. He founded the New Eastern Politics forum/blog in 2010. He was a Research Assistant at the Armenian Diaspora Research Center at Haigazian University. He authors articles and delivers seminars mainly on minority rights and regional security issues. He is also a presenter of the “Turkey Today” program in Radio Voice of Van.
Dr Merve Reyhan Kayikci
Merve Reyhan Kayikci is a postdoctoral researcher for the H2020 funded project Religion Toleration and Peace (RETOPEA). She is trained as a social and cultural anthropologist. She obtained her PhD degree from the Interculturalism, Migration and Minorities Research center at the Catholic University of Leuven in 2018. Her current research focuses on European Islamic heritage and civil society. Her general research interests include Islam in Europe, activism among Muslims, gender, heritage, ethics and subjectivity, race, and diversity.
Dr Deniz Yonucu
Deniz Yonucu is a lecturer in the Sociology of Crime at Newcastle University. She received her Ph.D. in social anthropology from Cornell University. Her first book “Police, Provocation, Politics: Counterinsurgency in Istanbul “ (Cornell UP), presents a counterintuitive analysis of policing, focusing particular attention on the incitement of counterviolence and perpetual conflict by state security apparatus. Her work appeared in Current Anthropology, IJURR, Social & Legal Studies, BJMES, among others. She is also co-founder and co-convenor of the Anthropology of Surveillance Network (ANSUR).
Dr Verena Meyer
Verena Meyer is an Assistant Professor (Universitair Docent) of Islam in South and Southeast Asia at Leiden University. In her work, she draws on ethnographic field research, training in contemporary critical theory, and literary studies in Javanese, Malay, and Arabic to investigate questions of Islamic identity, the role of memory and the formation of heritage, and the transmission of knowledge across time and space. Before coming to Leiden, she received her PhD in Islamic Studies at Columbia University and held a postdoc in Norway. Her work has been supported by the Mellon Foundation and the Global Religion Research Initiative, and published in journals including Philological Encounters, Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, and the Journal of Southeast Asian Studies. Her departmental website is here.
Dr Erol Sağlam
Erol Sağlam is a social anthropologist working on masculinities, bureaucracies, statecraft, and societal violence as well as on collective memory and intangible cultural heritage in contemporary Turkey. He completed his doctoral research at Birkbeck, University of London in 2017. After his PhD, Dr Saglam worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Stockholm University and Freie Universität Berlin and was a visiting scholar at the University of Cambridge. He is currently a lecturer at Istanbul Medeniyet University. He has published on conspiracy theories, societal violence, statecraft, and collective memory.
Dr Kusha Sefat
Kusha Sefat is an Assistant Professor in Sociology at the University of Tehran. He received his Ph.D. as a Queens' College Walker Scholar in Sociology at the University of Cambridge in 2017 and was the recipient of the Best Dissertation Prize, awarded by the Foundation for Iranian Studies (U.S.). Kusha brings Science and Technology Studies and, interrelatedly, the new materialism to bear on historical, political, and cultural sociology, with an emphasis on the Global South. His recent book “Revolution of Things” (Princeton, 2023) explores the everyday material object’s implications in the various forms that social relations take, including domination.
Prof Gregory Jackson
Gregory Jackson is a professor of management at Freie Universität Berlin. His work concerns corporate governance, corporate misconduct, and work and inequality in an internationally comparative perspective. He received his PhD in Sociology from Columbia University, and has held previous positions at the MPIfG in Cologne, RIETI in Tokyo, King’s College London, and University of Bath. His research is published in highly regarding social science journals. He has held large grants from the EU, German Science Foundation, and ESRC, and received several awards including the JIBS Decade award (2018). His departmental website is here.
Ms Kemi O’Grady
Kemi O’Grady has worked as a study coordinator and project administrator at UCL for the last five years. She supported the Takhayyul Team for three years, between 2020 and 2023. She has a strong interest in research projects involving people, in particular, their experiences and opinions. Formerly, she was one of the research assistants for a project on Parkinson’s disease at UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology.