Zeynep Ozgen
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; Social theory
Zeynep Ozgen is a political sociologist and ethnographer with a special focus on the Middle East. Her research integrates ethnographic and historial analysis, utilizing multi-sited participant observation, longitudinal qualitative fieldwork, in-depth interviews, and archival research. 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. Pious Politics is the winner of the Charles Tilly Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Book Award from the American Sociological Association’s Section on Collective Behavior and Social Movements (2026), and the Best Book Award from the American Political Science Association's Section on European Politics and Society (2026).
Her other work centers on ethnic relations, minority rights, and education reform. Articles from these streams of work appeared in Theory and Society, Qualitative Sociology, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Nations and Nationalism, and New Perspectives on Turkey. This scholarship has been recognized with awards from the American Sociological Association, including the Sociology of Religion Section’s Distinguished Article Award (2024) and the Global and Transnational Sociology Section’s Best Scholarly Article Award (Honorable Mention, 2022).
Additionally, Ozgen’s research has been supported by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Social Science Research Council, the Fulbright-Hays Program, and the American Council for Learned Societies, as well as the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Council for European Studies, and the Max Planck Institute. At NYUAD, she teaches courses on sociological theory, ethnographic fieldwork, and religious social movements.