I am an Associate Professor of Sociology at New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD) and a Global Network Associate Professor in the Sociology Department at New York University. Before joining NYUAD, I held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Germany. I received my PhD in Sociology from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 2014. I received my BA and MA in Political Science from Bogazici University in Istanbul.

My research lies at the intersection of politics and culture. Empirically, I examine the struggles between state actors and religious groups in Turkey over culture, both as a site and resource for political control and social identity. Theoretically, I aim to deepen our understanding of how individuals, social movements, and bureaucracies defend or challenge the existing order by cultivating cultural sensibilities and aptitudes. Other research strands examine ethnic hierarchies and citizenship policies in multicultural societies as well as the politics of education in the Middle East. I have conducted extensive fieldwork in Turkey on religious mobilization, ethnic relations, and minority rights. Analytically, my tools range from multi-sited participant observation and longitudinal qualitative fieldwork to in-depth interviews and archival research.

My book Pious Politics: Cultural Foundations of the Islamist Movement in Turkey was published by Cambridge University Press in 2025. My articles have appeared in Theory and Society, Qualitative Sociology, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Nations and Nationalism, and New Perspectives on Turkey, among others.

I have been a recipient of distinguished fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Social Science Research Council, the Fulbright-Hays Program, the American Council for Learned Societies, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Council for European Studies, and the Max Planck Institute.

I am currently working on two articles. The first explores political repression and dissent in Turkey, and the second examines the methodological gains ethnography can achieve by integrating historical analysis into study of the present.