Book Talk: Bound Together - The Secularization of Turkey’s Literary Fields and the Western Promise of Freedom

Department of International Relations at Özyeğin University invites you to the online book talk titled "Bound Together: The Secularization of Turkey’s Literary Fields and the Western Promise of Freedom." Dr. Barış Büyükokutan from Koç University will join us as the speaker together with Dr. Berna Zengin from Özyeğin University as the discussant. The event will revolve around Dr. Büyükokutan's book, "Bound Together: The Secularization of Turkey's Literary Fields and the Western Promise of Freedom",that will be published by the University of Michigan Press in December. The event will take place online via Zoom on the 3rd of November 2021 between 18:00 and 19:30. 

Please click here for the event registration form. The online Zoom link will be shared half an hour before the event with participants who filled out the registration form via the e-mail addresses they provided on the form.

Note: The event will be in English

Abstract

Bound Together takes a new look at twentieth-century Turkey, asking what it will take for Turkish women and men to regain their lost freedoms, and what the Turkish case means for the prospects of freedom and democracy elsewhere. Contrasting the country’s field of poetry, where secularization was the joint work of pious and nonpious people, with that of the novel, this book inquires into the nature of western-nonwestern difference.

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Dr. Barış Büyükokutan

Barış Büyükokutan is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Koç University. He is the author of Medeni Cumhuriyet: Katılımcı Hayatın Sosyolojisi (Koç University Press) and of various articles published in, among others, American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, and Qualitative Sociology. His work explores the intersection of the sociology of intellectuals, sociology of religion, and civic republican social theory. Currently, he is working on the rise of jazz to art music status in the United States.

Dr. Berna Zengin

Berna Zengin Arslan received her B.Sc. from Bilkent University, Electrical and Electronics Department. After completing her MSc. in Gender and Women’s Studies Program at the Middle East Technical University, she received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California Santa Cruz. Dr. Zengin Arslan spent the 2019-2020 academic year as a Fulbright Fellow at the UC Berkeley Rhetoric Department. She was awarded a two-year Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship for the period of 2010-2012 and with this fellowship, she acted as a visiting assistant professor at the City University of New York Graduate Center. She was a visiting researcher at the Sciences PO CERI, Paris in 2017 with the Turkish Embassy of France Scholarship. She also received the Turkish Science Academy Award for the Young Scientists in 2015 and the Sociological Review 2014 Prize for Outstanding Scholarship with her article jointly written with Bryan S. Turner. Her research areas are studies of secularism and religion, science and religion, gender, science and technology, Islam, and secularism in Turkey and Europe.