Key Research Interests:
- Social institutions
- Secularism
- Modern Islam
- Turkey
- Religion, State, and Society
I am an Assistant Professor in Sociology at Istanbul Medeniyet University. I received my doctorate in Anthropology and Sociology of Religion from the University of Chicago.
I studied Political Science and Sociology at the Boğaziçi University, then my pursuit of social scientific study of religion took me to the University of Chicago for MA and PhD. My dissertation, “Subject to Approval: Sanction and Censure in Ottoman Istanbul, 1889-1923,” examines the Ottoman governance of Islamic publications and religio-moral public conduct. I am currently expanding my historical and sociological investigation of the late Ottoman religious bureaucracy on Islamic book print, Sufi orders, and public acts.
I am interested in examining the conceptions of “religion” and “secular” specifically through their manifestations in the Ottoman Muslim landscape of periodicals, during the highly social and political transformative years of the early twentieth century. While they are separate projects, I expect to find the modern state’s institutionalized governance of the religious to be strongly connected with concurrent intellectual and public discussions on religion and its foremost counterpart, the secular. Accordingly, I seek to investigate further the ways in which institutional and political governance of religion and secular juxtaposed with their intellectualized trajectories under the late Ottoman and early Turkish Republican rules.
Academic Profiles:
https://avesis.medeniyet.edu.tr/ayse.polat
https://medeniyet.academia.edu/AysePolat
Selected Publications:
- “The Novel as a Social Laboratory: Celal Nuri and the Woman Question," in Ottoman Culture and the Project of Modernity: Reform and the Tanzimat Novel, eds. Monica M. Ringer and Etienne Charrière, (I.B. Tauris, forthcoming 2019).
- “The Human Jesus: A Debate in the Ottoman Press,” Mizan: Journal of Interdisciplinary Approaches to Muslim Societies and Civilizations 2 (2017): 87-120.
- “A Conflict on Baha’ism and Islam in 1922: Abdullah Cevdet and State Religious Agencies,” İnsan ve Toplum 5 (2015): 29-42.
- “A Comparison of Charles Taylor and Talal Asad on the Issue of Secularity,” İnsan ve Toplum 2 (2012): 217-230.
