Zeynep Ozgen
Associate Program Head of Social Research and Public Policy; Associate Professor of Social Research and Public Policy, NYU Abu Dhabi; Global Network Associate Professor of Sociology, Faculty of Arts and Science, NYU
Affiliation: NYU Abu Dhabi
Education: PhD University of California Los Angeles; BA Bogazici University
Research Areas: Political sociology; Social movements; Culture
Zeynep Ozgen is an Associate Professor of Social Research and Public Policy at New York University Abu Dhabi. Her main research areas are social movements, culture, and social theory with a special focus on the Middle East. Ozgen’s book, Pious Politics: Cultural Foundations of The Islamist Movement in Turkey (Cambridge University Press, 2025) is a sociological examination of the rise and resilience of Islamist politics in Turkey since the early twentieth century. Her other work centers on ethnic relations, minority rights, and education reform. Articles from these streams of work appeared at Theory and Society, Qualitative Sociology, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Nations and Nationalism, and New Perspectives on Turkey.
Ozgen’s research incorporates ethnographic research with historical analysis and draws on analytical tools ranging from multi-sited participant observation to longitudinal qualitative fieldwork, in-depth interviews, and archival research.
Her work has been recognized by the American Sociological Association (ASA), including the Sociology of Religion Section’s Distinguished Article Award (2024) and the Global and Transnational Sociology Section’s Best Scholarly Article Award (honoroble mention) (2022).
She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Social Science Research Council, the Fulbright-Hays Program, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Council for European Studies, the American Council for Learned Societies, and the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity.
At NYUAD, she teaches courses on Religious Social Movements, Ethnographic Fieldwork, and Contemporary Sociological Theory.