Scholar - Women Also Know History

Participant Info

Website URL: https://www.aku.edu/ismc/faculty/pages/profile.aspx?ProfileID=15&Name=Sevgi%20Adak

Keywords: Middle East, Turkey, gender history, history of feminism, veiling, anti-veiling campaigns, state-society relations, secularism, women in religious institutions, feminization of the religious sphere

About Me: I am an assistant professor at the Aga Khan Unviersity’s Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations in London, specialising in gender studies and history and politics of modern Turkey. I received my PhD from Leiden University, School of Middle Eastern Studies in 2015. Between 2009 and 2014, I was a research fellow at the International Institute for Social History, Amsterdam. Prior to joining AKU-ISMC , I taught at Istanbul Bahcesehir University, Department of Sociology. My academic interests include gender history, secularism and state-society relations in Turkey and contemporary feminisms in the Middle East. My book, Anti-Veiling Campaigns in Turkey: Gender, Power and Resistance under the Kemalist Regime, will be published by IB Tauris.

Recent Publications: “Turkish Secularism Revisited: The Diyanet and the Expansion of the Religious Sphere during the AKP Era,” The Middle East in London Magazine (SOAS) special issue on secularism in the Middle East, October-November 2017.

“Siyaset ve Toplumsal Cinsiyet” [Politics and Gender] in Toplumsal Cinsiyet Tartışmaları [Gender Debates], Feryal Saygılıgil (ed.), Istanbul: Dipnot, 2016, pp. 17-32. (Second edition released in February 2018)

“Yeni Türkiye’nin Yeni Diyaneti” [The New Diyanet of New Turkey], Birikim 319, November 2015, pp. 78-84.

“Women in the Post-Ottoman Public Sphere: Anti-Veiling Campaigns and Gendered Reshaping of Urban Space in Early Republican Turkey” in Women and the City, Women in the City: A Gendered Perspective for Ottoman Urban History, Nazan Maksudyan (ed.), New York: Berghahn, 2014, pp. 36-67.

“Anti-Veiling Campaigns and the Local Elites in Turkey of the 1930s: A View from the Periphery” in Anti-Veiling Campaigns in the Muslim World: Gender, Modernism and the Politics of Dress, Stephanie Cronin (ed.), London: Routledge, 2014, pp. 59-85.