Aysegul Kayagil

Aysegul Kayagil is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie (MSCA) Postdoctoral Fellow in History.

Her work focuses on race, ethnicity, gender, Turkish nationalism, and the legacies of slavery in the Middle East and North Africa. She is particularly interested in how race operates as an integral yet often subtle element in the making of Turkishness as the dominant ethno-national identity, and how the erasure of slavery under Ottoman rule is intertwined with racialized and gendered constructions of national belonging in Turkey. She has also published on the semantics of racial and ethnic identification in Turkey.

Before joining SOAS, she was a Visiting Assistant Professor of Sociology at Sarah Lawrence College (New York, USA). She received her PhD in Sociology from The New School for Social Research (New York, USA) and holds an MA in Comparative Studies in History and Society from Koç University (Istanbul, Turkey) and a BA in Sociology from Middle East Technical University (Ankara, Turkey).

Her research has been supported by grants and fellowships from the European Commission, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Swedish Institute.

Alongside her main research, she is developing a complementary mapping project that traces urban and rural sites significant for Afro-Turks’ self-identification and the legacies of slavery in Turkey.

• Race
• Racialization
• Gender
• Nationalism
• History of slavery in the Middle East and North Africa
• Qualitative methodologies
• Data visualisation