Zeynep Ozgen

Assistant Professor of Social Research and Public Policy Affiliation: NYU Abu Dhabi
Education: PhD University of California, Los Angeles; BA Bogazici University

Research Areas: Political sociology; Social movements; Culture


Zeynep Ozgen received her PhD in Sociology from the University of California Los Angeles in 2014. She is a political sociologist and ethnographer with research and teaching interests in social movements, culture, social theory, and the Middle East. She has conducted extensive fieldwork in Turkey on religious mobilization, ethnic relations, and minority rights.

Her current book project is an ethnographic and historical study of Islamist movements that use official and unofficial sites of religious socialization to implement a quiet, gradual, and remarkably robust project of sociopolitical Islamization in Turkey since the late 1970s. Her other research centers on struggles over the creation of subjectivities as well as ethnic relations and citizenship in multicultural societies. Her articles have been published at Theory and Society, Qualitative SociologyInternational Journal of Middle East StudiesNations and Nationalism, and minor publications have appeared in Perspectives on Europe and New Perspectives on Turkey.

She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Social Science Research Council, Fulbright-Hays/IIE, the American Council for Learned Societies, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the Council for European Studies. At NYUAD, she teaches ethnographic methods and social movements.

Courses Taught